Stranger and Stranger by Rob Reger Page B

ears, listening as hard as I could for anything at all. Ghostly birdcalls…pebbles rolling down the cliff…dry leaves rattling…I closedmy eyes for maximum concentration. Haunting birdcalls…grains of dirt compressing under my shoe…spider legs rubbing against one another…

    Pretty soon I had reached our lookout spot.
    “OtherMe!” I called, and listened.
    Eerie birdcalls…drop of cricket spit hitting cricket wing…my own blood pulsing in my eardrums…
    This was so stupid. That brat, that rotten annoying LAME piece of STINKY BRAT, she could ROT out here for all I cared. “EMILY!” I screamed. “Get out here, you stupid piece of…BRAT!”
    Creepy birdcalls…moth wings beating against air molecules…speck of pollen falling from dried-up wildflower…tiny straining intake of breath through constricted throat of OtherMe, sprawled in tangle of brush on the steep hillside twenty feet above the trail.
    That’s where she had been lying in wait for me and Patti, planning to leap down on us, shrieking like a demon, and scare the cheeks off us; at least that’s my best guess. When I found her she couldn’t move or speak. She was barely breathing. Based on my knowledge of the local fauna, I was pretty sure she’d been paralyzed by a bite from a black jackal spider, which would certainly be fatal within a few minutes if I didn’t do something to save her life.
    Yep.
    So what was I to do? Pretend I never found her? Sneak back to the car, knowing she would die before the Search and Rescue jerks got there? Or find the bite and suck the poison out the way Patti had taught me?
    Let her die?
    Suck the poison out?
    Let her die?
    Suck the poison out?
    I was crouching there in the bushes, hunkered over her, tapping my chin, trying to decide what to do, when she blinked. Took a breath. Twitched her fingers. And punched me in the mouth—not very hard, what with the semiparalysis and all, but enough to get my lip bloody.
    I yelled, and tackled her, and we skidded and slid twenty feet down to the trail, and started pummeling each other—by which I mean I mostly pummeled her, since she was still mostly paralyzed. But it’s not like I pummeled her very hard; I just wanted to punish her a little. And I definitely did NOT mean for her to roll away from me and slide off the trail, and tumble down that slope onto those boulders, and break her leg in several places.
    Of course I ran for help, and in a minute I could hear voices—Jock, Biff, Tip, and Winky were finally making their way up the trail toward us. I brought them to her as fast as I could, and if she says any different she is LYING.
    So here we are, sitting in the car in the hospital parking lot,waiting for SuperAnnoyingMe to be released. Patti has been crying quite a bit. I wish she would just go wait inside, but she doesn’t want to be alone, and she doesn’t want the hospital staff asking questions about her identical daughters, like why they have the same name. I tried to be nice and comfort her by pointing out that if anything serious ever DID happen to one of us, at least she’d have a spare; but it just didn’t seem to calm her the way I thought it would.
    Later
    Of course, the most annoying part about SuperAnnoyingMe getting herself semipoisoned and breaking her leg was that she couldn’t help me with our prank!
    Anyway, by the time we got home, Patti looked like a chunk of frozen hell on a stick and was in no shape to notice me slipping out of the house. I spent a few quality hours at Town Hall working on the Manifesto, giving it every bit of purest, darkest Strange I had, channeling all my irritations with Patti and all my anger at PatheticMe to make it as potent and raw as possible. And, you know, it might actually be a good thing PatheticMe wasn’t around to see the final product, cuz this little Manifesto of mine is so Strange, it’s even scaring ME.
    Once everything was set, locked, and loaded, I ran the projection a few times through just to make sure