Chapter 30

Here Comes The Neighborhood

Ty was freaking out. Not only did this fellow rip a hole in the universe and control his fake father with some supernatural string, but he looked exactly like San on top of it all. There were only two major differences: where San was a bony white, this guy was pitch black; San's teeth were a hodgepodge of horrible, his twin's were long, sharp, and perfect.

Ty wasn't going to stick around to see if those teeth could tear through flesh as easily as they looked. Driven by the mental image of being eaten, he twisted his sword and yanked one last time. Instead of freeing it like he'd hoped, he broke the leg in half with one chunk still attached to his sword. He'd take what he could get.

With an upward flick of his wrist, strings sprung from the Puppet Master's palm, dozens of them arcing behind him. They split into groups and hit the front doors of the houses on the other side of the street. The families inside plowed out soon after, the strings attached to their joints.

The Puppet Master broke into cackling as Ty turned and ran, a small army of wooden soldiers not far behind him.

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From the corner of his eye, Ty saw more of the eerie string coming toward him, as well. He swung his mighty leg-blade at them, and the weapon slipped straight through as if the strings were made of water. The wooden leg smashed onto the street, his sword free of the limb at last.

He swung again, wild and fast. Unperturbed by Ty's attacks, the strings sped right on to their destination: his house. Not a second after they went inside, the door smashed off of its hinges with such force it flew over the lawn.

Acting on reflexes, Ty's arm sliced up and cut the door in two with his sword. The pieces spun, harmless, on either side of him.

In the broken doorway of his home the remainder of his family stood in their full puppet glory. Their transformation was more than a trade of skin for wood, hideous alterations added into the mix. Lily's fingernails were as long as she was tall, sharpened to a point. His mother's arms and legs were replaced with alien-like, curved limbs—which she used to hang upside down from the door frame. The whole left side of his grandmother's body was an unnatural bulge, her back an Igor-style hump to it, and her arm muscles were four, five times their normal size—it was this gigantic limb that was to blame for the broken door.

Running that direction was out of the question, for sure.

Ty changed course for his backyard, but kept both eyes on his family, unsure what they were going to do.

Lily jumped into his grandmother's oversized hand, who leaned back into a pitching position and threw. Lily was on his tail in an instant, her claws held out in front of her. One jab at this speed would be enough to ram them straight through his skull.

Ty caught the nails on his sword and pushed them up, away from his body. The force of his sister's attack knocked him off his feet, the siblings both airborne. Lily hissed at him and resorted to kicking him repeatedly in the stomach when she couldn't get her nails free. Each kick brought a stab more of annoyance, not pain. At the fourth hit, his sword shoke. Ty let the force of the sword take over as it blasted out and cut the nails down to proper human grooming standards. She hissed in pain as she passed over Ty's shoulder and collapsed onto the ground in a pile.

Ty landed on his back, but flipped himself up and onto his feet. He spared a glance at Lily, sitting there in the grass, holding her broken nails and sob-hissing as she tried to reattach them—then he was off again, into his backyard.

Rows of houses were back there, puppets already coming out of them, clogging the space between the buildings. Even if he could get past would it do any good? Everything else had been so similar, he could only assume that this place would end at a solid wall, much like San's world.

He didn't even have to turn around to know that the puppets were rounding the side of his house as more came from the homes to his left and right, blocking him in.

All was calm as the boy stared down the army of puppets.

He expected the Puppet Master to appear and break the standoff, but the attackers acted without orders. Oh well, that sped up the beat down process.

The first puppets came from behind him. He sidestepped their attack (more like a group stumble), and slashed at the nearest one, cutting its leg and bringing it to the ground. The rest didn't even pause as they trampled their fallen neighbor.

They reached for Ty, like a mass of mindless zombies looking for fresh meat. He cut any hand or limb that came his way without hesitation. The puppets didn't mind. Armless ones tried to headbutt him. Legless ones crawled on the ground, trodden upon by those still mobile, yet they continued their assault.

Ty made two clean slices on the next puppet to approach him. Arms and legs severed, the torso continued its approach with small hops.

It was obvious that this was not going to work.

Ty gave up fighting them off and ran toward the only hope he had: the back door. If he could get inside, maybe he could get the upper hand on the army, lead them in, and find a break in their ranks to escape through.

He was about to slide open the door when he noticed: there was no glass in the frames.

He heard a noise above him, a little screech that could have been the sound of fingernails down a chalkboard. He looked up to see his puppet mother on the roof, the two pieces of glass balanced on the tips of her strange arms. The sound came from the glass sliding down the claws until it reached the tipping point.

The glass fell and Ty threw himself inside the house...

To where a hulking monster laid in wait.

Ty rolled on the hard kitchen floor and landed on his feet as the glass met the ground, splintering into a shower of razor sharp shards. He had time to take one more step before a fist split the darkness in the house, and then it hit.

Air, glass, ground; that was all Ty could process of what followed next. Before he knew it, he was looking up at what was sure to be a fake sky. His clothes were sliced all over, his body covered in cuts from where he’d been thrown through the raining glass. His only memory of the event was a brief vision of shining, spinning shards.

He got to his feet and, before his eyes, the cuts on his arms healed, treating him to an up close look at his superhuman healing process. The bleeding stopped, open wounds became scabs, scabs gave way to new skin. He lifted his shirt (which, sadly, had not begun to mend itself) and, sure enough, his whole body was healed.

Neat.

What was not neat was the entire army of puppets, surrounding him. His meet up with the giant fist gave them time to close the distance, and they'd gathered around him in a circle, patiently waiting for Ty to reorient himself.

At least they have better manners than zombies.

They fell upon him like a sinkhole, collapsing around the boy as he spun his sword above his head, cutting heads and limbs left and right. It wasn't enough. The puppets were an unrelenting wall of wood that forced Ty to the ground, burying him underneath their thrashing bodies.

He felt their hands try to restrain him as he struggled to stand against the wiggling mass of wooden monsters. They held his arms, yanked them behind him—yet he kept going, rising centimeter by centimeter, inch by inch. One puppet latched onto his head and drove its fists against Ty's head. Brain damage would come before he gave into the pain.

More hands clamped down upon his legs, yanking forcefully and pulling them out from under him, slamming him back to the ground.

The puppets held him down—at least ten pairs of hands for each of his limbs. Despite his desire to continue fighting, he couldn't even move his pinky fingers.

With his limited range of movement, Ty's view was also impaired. It was thanks to this that he saw it.

In front of his face, right there in the grass, was a familiar shape he saw almost every day of his life. The grass in this spot was a lighter green, the difference so slight that he doubted he would have been able to see it if he was standing up. But here, it was the perfect size and shape of the printed star on the surface of his trampoline, in the center of his yard. The exact spot where it would have been back home.

Its effect was instant; Ty's mind leapt back to days spent jumping up and down, his imagination running wild. It was about time to do that again.

His sword glowed as he imagined, with all the intensity he could muster, of leaping into the sky, right out of this mess. The puppets nearest the sword released Ty at once, retreating and pushing their companions back in their haste to escape. His sword arm was freed, as was his right leg. All he needed to get off the ground.

The image still burned in his mind, Ty kicked off the ground with his one free leg and soared upward as he envisioned.

Ty's flying accomplishment was short-lived. Wood fell all around him, things going exactly as he'd hoped when, out of nowhere, Anna. She pushed off two falling puppets' faces and launched herself straight for Ty. The pair of handcuffs clutched in her right hand, her other in a deadly slapping position.

He spun his sword into place in the nick of time. Anna's fingers closed around the weapon and held it back as she whipped the handcuffs over it, toward Ty.

Thinking fast, Ty swung his legs up and caught Anna's arm between his shoes. The cuff dangled harmlessly in front of his face as he glared at his old captor. Off his wrist and far away from him—that was how he planned to keep them.

Anna struggled to pull her arm free; Ty didn't give her the chance. He twisted his legs and jerked down with such force that Anna lost her grip on Ty's sword and sailed clear over his house. She crashed into the lawn, taking out a group of soldiers in the process. Ty landed on the roof in a roll and came to a stop at the edge.

From his new vantage point he had a clear view of the yard and the center square—or what little there was to see. The entire ground crawled with puppets. Above, storm clouds formed, rolling in to block out the moon and drown the puppet army in darkness—but not before he saw the cars pull up the one road into the neighborhood. Red lasers filled the night soon after. Ty didn't need to be able to see the details to know what that meant: reinforcements.

At least he was nice and high up, away from all the—

A blade sliced the side of his arm. He turned in time to see his puppet mother before she darted out of reach. She hunched down, ready to strike again.

Ty didn't even raise his sword. This monster was getting old.

She jumped, her four arm-leg things spread open like the talons of a mutant bird. Ty went in low, swung up, and that was it—she shrieked in pain, her back limbs all but gone and, with nothing to stand on, she disappeared over the side of the roof.

Now... Ty thought. Three... two...

Right on time, the shingles below his feet shoke and creaked. He took one big step back and watched as the predictable fist tore a gaping hole in the roof. These puppets were one trick ponies.

He grabbed one of the fingers—it took his entire arm to get a hold on it—imagined jumping backward, taking the monster with him, and let the vision blossom into beautiful reality. Except he overshot the safety of his house, and flew above the yard, four or five stories into the air.

He hung upside down, face to face with this monstrous version of his grandmother while it stared back, almost asking, Well, what now?

Ty flipped the puppet around, placed his sword against its gut, and gave a mental push. He figured that was a satisfactory answer.