Neal Shusterman - Everwild

The sun set. The sun rose. The sun slowly crossed the sky, and by noon the next day, the rifle-toting turtle had not come out of his shell. Nick lost none of his resolve, but Johnnie-O was beginning to suspect that the Ripper had either found a coin and evaporated into the next world, or he had decided he was never coming out of his spaceship again.

Then, late in the afternoon, they heard the clunk of metal on metal, and the small, circular hatch began to open. It only opened an inch-just enough for the Ripper to peer out-but an inch was all they needed. Nick wedged his fingers in the opening.

"Grab it! Hurry!"

The Ripper tried to pull the door closed, but Nick's fingers blocked the way. Johnnie-O gripped the edge of the door and pulled with all his might. The hatch swung wide, and they both dove in, tackling the Ripper, who wouldn't stop cursing.

The shuttle's flight deck was cramped, and filled with hard metallic surfaces. It was all very disorienting in vertical liftoff position, with chairs bolted to the "wall" instead of the floor. Dim light spilled in from the darkly tinted viewport, directly overhead, like a skylight.

"Get out!" screamed the Ripper, "This here is my place! MINE!" He struggled with them, but when he saw the size of Johnnie-O's hands, his eyes went wide, and he scrambled away. In that cramped space, however, there wasn't far he could go.

"We're not going to hurt you!" Nick told him.

"Speak for yourself!" said Johnnie-O, trying to reach around a chair for the Ripper, who continued to shift out of reach.

While Johnnie-O and the Ripper played their little cat and mouse, Nick took a moment to gauge the situation. The Ripper seemed about thirteen. He wore a gray Confederate Army uniform, complete with that odd little hat. There were weapons strewn around the flight deck that the Ripper kept reaching for, but Johnnie-O kept kicking them out of reach. None of those weapons were Civil War issue. There were very modern, very efficient automatic rifles, pistols, and even a submachine gun, along with countless bullets and loaded magazines. This kid may have died during the Civil War, but now he had an entire arsenal of modern military ordinance.

"Leave me be!" the kid shouted, "or I'll ecto-rip yer arms right outta their sockets!"

"I'd like to see you try!" yelled Johnnie-O, finally getting a grip on him. The ripper tried to pull on Johnnie-O's arms, but they were too muscular. So instead the Ripper did something else-something Nick would not have believed if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. The Ripper reached right through Johnnie-O's face… and pulled out his brain.

Johnnie-O froze with the sudden shock of it, and Nick could only stare in disbelief.

A brain.

Right there in the Ripper's hands.

It was just like Isaiah had said.

It didn't look like a real brain; it looked more like a plastic model, with the various lobes labeled in bold lettering- perhaps something Johnnie-O once saw in a classroom somewhere. This was Johnnie-O's memory of a brain, and the ripper now held it in his hand like an oversize walnut.

"Aaaaaaah!" wailed Johnnie-O in the kind of abject terror that can only come from seeing your brain held out before you. "Give it back! Give it back!" Painless though it was, there was something fundamentally disturbing about this-not just the fact of seeing one's own brain held up for observation, but to suddenly have one's very consciousness separate and apart from one's body, and yet still tethered as if by some weird wireless connection. For Johnnie-O, the sensation was far worse than pain.

"AAAAAH!" he screamed. "Put it back in! I swear I won't touch you, just put it back in!"

"Maybe I'll just squish it beneath my feet! Squish, squish!"

"Noooo!"

It infuriated Nick to see Johnnie-O helpless and humiliated, so Nick reached for something that might give them a brief balance of power. He found a hand grenade, and held it up to the Ripper.

"Give him back his brain, or I'll pull the pin, and shove this thing in your mouth."

The Ripper laughed at that. "Won't matter!" he said. "If I gets blowed up, I'll just pull back together again, like it was nuthin'!"

"Yes," Nick said with a grin. "In theory…"

The wider Nick's grin got, the more worried the Ripper became. "Whadaya mean, theory?"

"I mean that bullets and cuts are one thing. They heal in seconds, sure… but if you're blown to smithereens, how do you know all those smithereens are gonna find one another again?"

Clearly the Ripper had never thought of this.

"You have till the count of three." Nick reached for the pin, ready to pull it. "One… two…" "Fine!" The Ripper went over to Johnnie-O, who was now whimpering in a corner, clutching his intensely empty head. "Who needs it?" said the Ripper. "Probably got worms anyway." Then he pushed Johnnie-O's brain right back inside him.

The Ripper then scrambled over the vertically mounted chairs and reached up toward the spacecraft's control panel-then hit a button.

A hatch popped open like a trapdoor right beneath poor Johnnie-O, who was still just recovering from his brain-ripping ordeal, and he plunged through the open hatch into darkness. Nick could hear him tumbling down a tunnel, and crashing into whatever filled the cargo hold of the shuttle.

"Was that really necessary?" shouted Nick.

"You're next!" threatened the Ripper.

Nick was angry enough to pull the pin on the grenade and blow them both to smithereens, but he fought the urge, found a foothold, and climbed toward the Ripper.

"We're just here to talk! Why can't you calm down long enough to listen!"

"I warned you!" said the Ripper, and he reached in through Nick's chest, gripped his grubby hands around Nick's memory of a heart, and tugged.

To the amazement of them both, the Ripper did not get Nick's heart at all. Instead his hand came out covered in chocolate.

It surprised Nick as much as the Ripper, but he tried not to show it.

The Ripper stared at his hand, then at Nick, and for the first time the cranky Confederate Afterlight was truly frightened. "What… are you…?"

And although Nick never, ever used the words himself, seeing the Ripper's cocoa-coated hand brought home a growing reality he could no longer deny.

"I am the Chocolate Ogre," Nick said. "And you've made me very…

The look of terror on the Ripper's face was the most satisfying thing Nick had seen for a very long time. The Ripper's eyes were locked by Nick's angry gaze, and all the fight drained out of him. There was something about the Ripper's eyes-something about his face that wasn't quite right. Nick wasn't sure what it was, so he filed it away in his mind.

"What are you going to do to me?" the Ripper asked.

"Nothing. If you let my friend go."

Despite his fear of the Chocolate Ogre, the Ripper hesitated… but he did quickly glance to a particular green button on the console-a button covered by a clear plastic flap to prevent it from being pressed accidentally.

This, Nick knew, was a "tell." The Ripper's eyes had just given away exactly which button to push that would free Johnnie-O. All Nick had to do was press it. Nick reached up and flipped open the clear plastic cover.

"No! Don't!"

Nick savored the look of terrified helplessness on the Ripper's face for a moment. Then he pressed the green button.

Upon taking up residence in the shuttle many years ago, the Afterlight known as Zach the Ripper had gotten rid of the craft's original payload-a bunch of satellites and experiments that weren't doing anyone in Everlost any good. Besides, the massive cargo hold was the perfect place for the Ripper to store Everlost's finest weapon collection.

The Ripper had weapons and artillery of all kinds. Having developed an intimate knowledge of every military base within a hundred miles, the Ripper knew exactly where to find the best arms, and was highly skilled at ripping items-even heavy, awkward ones-from the living world, and into Everlost.