Sven Carter & the Android Army Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  SVEN CARTER

  & THE TRASHMOUTH EFFECT

  “Sven and his friends are the perfect motley crew of outcasts determined to save the world. . . . Over the top and full of laughs.”

  —SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “A page-turner that’s entertaining right down to the Acknowledgments section. Hand this fast-paced romp to an adventurer in the making.”

  —BULLETIN OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1.0: < value= [Face, Meet Anvil] >

  CHAPTER 2.0: < value= [RV, Meet Tree] >

  CHAPTER 3.0: < value= [Our Plan Goes Up in Smoke] >

  CHAPTER 4.0: < value= [Roadkill] >

  CHAPTER 5.0: < value= [Stuck in the Middle] >

  CHAPTER 6.0: < value= [A Walk in the Park] >

  CHAPTER 7.0: < value= [Actually, a Walk in the Woods] >

  CHAPTER 8.0: < value= [Let’s Go Shopping] >

  CHAPTER 9.0: < value= [Plan C] >

  CHAPTER 10.0: < value= [You’re a Poo] >

  CHAPTER 11.0: < value= [I Want to Poke My Ears Out] >

  CHAPTER 12.0: < value= [Octogranny Doesn’t Eat Fire] >

  CHAPTER 13.0: < value= [A Slip of the Tongue] >

  CHAPTER 14.0: < value= [I Spill Some D&D’s] >

  CHAPTER 15.0: < value= [Smells Kinda Fishy to Me] >

  CHAPTER 16.0: < value= [We Get Lunch] >

  CHAPTER 17.0: < value= [Something’s Rotten in the State of Colorado] >

  CHAPTER 18.0: < value= [I Give Ivy the Bad Good News] >

  CHAPTER 19.0: < value= [No, It’s Not Fun] >

  CHAPTER 20.0: < value= [We Get Mobbed] >

  CHAPTER 21.0: < value= [I Get a Little Sister] >

  CHAPTER 22.0: < value= [The Runt of the Litter] >

  CHAPTER 23.0: < value= [I Kill My Friends] >

  CHAPTER 24.0: < value= [New Dog, Old Trick] >

  CHAPTER 25.0: < value= [A Full Moon Rising] >

  CHAPTER 26.0: < value= [Nothing Butt Problems] >

  CHAPTER 27.0: < value= [Thumbs-up!] >

  CHAPTER 28.0: < value= [I Get Some Air] >

  CHAPTER 29.0: < value= [We Decide to Get Takeout] >

  CHAPTER 30.0: < value= [Oh, Rats!] >

  CHAPTER 31.0: < value= [A Rolling Deep Fryer] >

  CHAPTER 32.0: < value= [Definitely Not the Voice of Reason] >

  CHAPTER 33.0: < value= [I Give Sam a Knuckle Sandwich] >

  CHAPTER 34.0: < value= [Bus Stop] >

  CHAPTER 35.0: < value= [Monkey Business (Literally)] >

  CHAPTER 36.0: < value= [Working. Shut Up. Kthanksbye.] >

  CHAPTER 37.0: < value= [Things Are Totally Horked] >

  CHAPTER 38.0: < value= [This Is Worse Than Planet of the Apes] >

  CHAPTER 39.0: < value= [Mi Unhorks the Interwebs] >

  CHAPTER 40.0: < value= [Going Up] >

  CHAPTER 41.0: < value= [75 Becomes My Least-Favorite Number] >

  CHAPTER 42.0: < value= [The Muse Pays a Visit] >

  CHAPTER 43.0: < value= [Going Down] >

  CHAPTER 44.0: < value= [The Nanobot Is a Brat] >

  CHAPTER 45.0: < value= [Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody, Everywhere] >

  Acknowledgments

  Sven Carter & The Trashmouth Effect Excerpt

  About the Author

  For Mom and Dad. Thanks for making me.

  And for making me who I am.

  CHAPTER 1.0:

  < value= [Face, Meet Anvil] >

  WHO KNEW THAT THE TOUGHEST person I’d ever met would melt into a pile of goo three words into a song?

  Actually, that’s not exactly true. She hadn’t entirely melted into a pile of goo. Because a pile of goo didn’t have a fist that felt like a five-hundred-pound anvil slamming into your face.

  I reached this insight—about the anvil, not the goo—the moment Alicia Toth’s right fist plowed into my face and felled me as efficiently as Godzilla kicking over a miniature Eiffel Tower made of toothpicks.

  I should probably explain. Let me rewind a bit.

  Junkman Sam’s ancient motor home creaked and groaned as it lurched along I-90. Niagara Falls was two hours behind us. Schenectady was two hours ahead.

  I stared out the window, even though there was nothing to look at. It wasn’t light yet, so the only view I had was the reflection of my own face in the glass. When the occasional car would blow by our slow-moving rust bucket, its headlights washed me out of existence for a moment or two until my face reappeared in the darkened window.

  “You’re sure he said that, Sven?” Alicia asked for the fifth time. “Those were his exact words?”

  For the fifth time, I gave her the same answer. “Yes. I’m sure. He asked if I ever wondered why I was called Seven. Then he laughed and said, ‘A little something for you to ponder when you think of me.’ Only with more stuttering and gurgling because his head was hanging from a gigantic electromagnet.”

  “You’re sure?” Alicia repeated.

  I sighed and went back to looking out the window. Dr. Shallix, the cybernetic mastermind behind srok rasplaty—the day of reckoning—a plot to extinguish every human life on Earth, had been dead for hours. Yet he was still making my life miserable. It wasn’t easy coming to terms with the fact that I’d been Shallix’s superweapon—a pawn in his evil plan.

  “Maybe he didn’t mean there are other Ticks out there waiting to kill everyone on the planet,” Will suggested hopefully. “Maybe he just meant they screwed up the first six Ticks they tried to build. You know, like it took them seven tries to get it right.” He ran an oversize hand through his tousled red hair in a way that suggested he didn’t believe it himself.

  Alicia rounded on him. “And are you willing to bet six billion lives on that?” she snapped.

  Before Will could answer, Junkman Sam cleared his throat and called back to us from the driver’s seat. “I think it’s reasonable to assume that since Sven was designated Seven Omicron, there are other Synthetics like him in the Omicron line.”

  The color drained out of Will’s face. “Wait! You’re saying there are six more Ticks like Sven out there waiting to exterminate all humans?”

  Junkman Sam shrugged. “No, I’m not saying that.”

  A long, relieved sigh escaped Will’s lips.

  Sam continued. “Could be six more. Could be six hundred. Who knows?”

  Will’s sigh turned into a kind of strangled moan. He started flipping an old ashtray open and closed.

  That was kind of Will’s thing. He had OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. So when he was scared or stressed or upset, he’d do these little rituals. You know, like turning light switches on and off. Or opening and closing doors. Stuff like that.

  Of course, compared to my thing, Will’s thing was nothing. I ate stuff. Gross stuff. Like, for example, a wad of old gum stuck in the ashtray Will was messing with.

  “You think they’re all programmed to do the same thing as Sven?” Alicia asked, watching me nearly break my teeth on the decades-old gum. “Incubate superviruses that’ll wipe out humanity?”

  Sam scratched his stubbly chin. “Maybe. They may have mass-produced that model and designed each one to function as a disease vector.”

  Alicia bit her lip nervously. “If there are that many of those things running around, we’re in big trouble.”

  Things. That’s what I was. A thing that was made, not born. A weapon. A Synthetic humanlike object. Thinking about it made my stomach turn.

  I walked to the front of the motor home and turned o
n the radio. I didn’t care what was on. Anything was better than hearing my friends talk about me like I was a thing.

  Okay, I take that back. Because Dixon Watts was singing. As usual, it sounded just like a cat that had gotten its tail caught in the door.

  Girl, you’re as fine as some really smooth sandpaper.

  I want to kiss your face more than a lightsaber.

  I reached out to turn to another station.

  Junkman Sam’s right hand flew off the steering wheel and slapped my arm away from the radio. “Hey, I love this song.”

  I stared at him like he had just told me his father was an onion bagel. “You’re joking, right?” I asked, somehow knowing he wasn’t joking. “I mean, you have to understand just how much this song sucks.”

  “Dude, shut up!” Will barked. “This tune is awesome!”

  Girl, I love you like a dog loves its kibble.

  Why can’t you love me back just a libble?

  “Come on!” I protested. “Listen to it! ‘Libble’ isn’t even a word! He’s terrible!”

  Alicia scowled at me. “Take that back! Dix is amazing!”

  “Yeah, you must be the only person on Earth who doesn’t love him!” Will added.

  “A few weeks ago you didn’t even know who he was!” I countered.

  It was true. A month ago, nobody on the planet had heard of Dixon Watts. Then he burst onto the scene like a mushy jack-o’-lantern in December, the biggest teen-pop mega-superstar in the history of music. His song “Girl, You Are My Shredded Wheat” was at the top spot on every chart in the world. And spots two through twelve on those charts were filled with the other songs from his first album. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing one of those ear-manglers.

  “How can you listen to this?” I pressed. “He sounds like a blender full of quarters! No, you know what he sounds like? A garbage disposal full of forks. He’s the worst singer—”

  I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Because that was the moment Alicia’s anvil of a fist smashed into my face.

  * * *

  The only good thing about being knocked out by Alicia Toth was that I was unconscious for the rest of Dixon Watts’s song. When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I was relieved to hear the DJ’s voice oozing in that slick, plasticky tone pop station radio announcers all like to use.

  “That was Dix Watts’s mega-superhit ‘Girl, You Are My Shredded Wheat.’ But don’t you dare turn off your radio! Because we’ve just gotten a brand-new surprise release from Dix! Here is ‘Babe, You Are My Scrambled Eggs’!”

  One of the worst things I’d ever heard came warbling out of the RV’s speakers.

  Babe, you are my scrambled eggs!

  I love you and your bacon legs!

  “Haven’t I suffered enough?” I blurted through a fat lip, instantly wishing I could bite back the words as I thought about Alicia’s fist and its run-in with my face. What was up with her, anyway? I mean sure, Alicia punching people wasn’t all that unusual. But because of a song? That was a bit much, even for her.

  So just relax and don’t put up a fight.

  ’Cause you know it’s gonna be all right.

  But Alicia just sat perfectly still with a weird, vacant look on her face. So did Will and Sam. It was like they were in a trance.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, guys?” I said tentatively.

  They ignored me.

  “Guys!” I shouted. “Are you okay?”

  Will turned and fixed a pair of glazed eyes on me. “Okay? Yeah. Better than okay. Amaaaaazing.”

  He said the words flatly, mechanically, drawing out the final A like it was an ice-cream cone he was savoring.

  “Will? What’s going on? A few minutes ago you were about to have a freak-out over the other Ticks out there. Now you’re amazing?”

  “Ticks?” Alicia intoned emotionlessly. “You know, I’ve been thinking they’re not all that bad. I don’t know why we were all worried about them.”

  Not all that bad? Alicia’s parents died at the hands of Ticks back when she lived at the Settlement in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. And you saw how she got when I insulted a song she liked. What was going on here?

  Yeah, don’t hate, don’t fight, don’t push, don’t shove.

  Just have a stack of pancake love.

  The song! It was doing something to my friends!

  I grabbed Will by the shoulders and shook him. “Will! Come on! Wake up!”

  But he just stared straight ahead with a half smile on his face.

  “Alicia!” I cried. “Are you with me?”

  I slapped her. Normally, something like that probably would have resulted in one or more of my bones being broken. But all Alicia did was sing along with the chorus:

  Babe, you are my scrambled eggs!

  I love you and your bacon legs!

  Ohh-kay.

  Time for plan B.

  I reached for the volume knob.

  Without warning, Junkman Sam sprang from his seat and clamped me into a headlock, his sweat-stained armpit pressing against my ear as he wrestled me away from the radio.

  One thought managed to break through the din: Nobody’s driving the motor home!

  A grinding sound echoed through the vehicle as we plowed through a guardrail.

  All of a sudden, the world was upside down. Instead of the blacktop illuminated by the headlights, all I could see through the windshield were clumps of grass and shrubs. Freed from Sam’s grip as the vehicle jolted and careened, I latched my arm around the back of the passenger seat to try to keep from being smashed to a pulp. The motor home convulsed once . . . twice . . . three times, as it hit little dips on the way down the slope . . . and slammed directly into a tree.

  CHAPTER 2.0:

  < value= [RV, Meet Tree] >

  WILL AND I WENT TO camp one summer where they had this huge rock-climbing wall. It must have been fifty feet tall.

  Our counselor, a tall, skinny, pimple-faced teenager named Ernie, prided himself on his reassuring way with the campers.

  “Don’t worry about falling off,” he’d told us with a laugh. “It’s not the fall that’ll kill you. It’s the sudden stop at the end.”

  So I guess it was lucky for those of us in Junkman Sam’s RV that there was no sudden stop at the end of our brief, yet utterly terrifying, off-road excursion. The tree we plowed into turned out to be half-rotted, barely slowing the vehicle at all. Its trunk snapped off about two feet from the ground, no match for the twelve thousand pounds of rusty metal slamming into it.

  The vehicle juddered to a stop. Its engine spluttered and coughed a few times and then went silent.

  Will, who had been thrown to the floor, stood up and blinked. “Wha-what happened?”

  “And why did we stop?” Alicia added, looking out the window. “Where are we?”

  “What the heck?” I cried. “What’s wrong with you people?”

  Alicia squinted at me. “Wrong with us? What are you talking about?”

  I glared at her. “Seriously? You don’t remember?”

  “Remember what?” Junkman Sam scratched his frizzled mop of hair. “Last I knew we were just west of Syracuse, on our way to Shallix’s office to find out how many other Ticks . . . uh, I mean people like you might be out there.”

  “So you don’t remember the Dixon Watts song?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well, I remember punching you because you were saying some very unfair things about one of Dixon’s songs, if that’s what you mean,” Alicia replied. Then she paused. “Which I guess was probably a little over-the-top. Sorry. But, you know . . . Dixon.”

  “No, not that one. I mean the song that was playing when we crashed. The one about the scrambled eggs.”

  All three of them stared at me blankly.

  “Scrambled eggs?” Will scrunched his eyebrows together. “Haven’t heard that one. But it sounds great.”

  “It isn’t!” I snapped. “You guys were . . . weird when it was on. Like you were in
a trance or something. I tried to turn the radio off and Sam jumped on me. That’s why we crashed.”

  “I don’t remember that.” Sam furrowed his brow. “But it doesn’t sound like something I would do.”

  “You did,” I assured him. “And Alicia, you said Ticks weren’t that bad.”

  Her face darkened. “No way I’d say that.”

  “Listen to me. It was the song. It had some kind of hold over you.” I turned to Will and Sam. “Over all of you.”

  Alicia opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t listen to the radio anymore,” Will suggested quietly, going back to nervously flipping the ashtray open and closed.

  Junkman Sam turned the key in the ignition.

  Nothing happened.

  “Listening to the radio won’t be an option unless we can get the motor home running.” He grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment, squeezed past me, and placed his hand on the RV’s side door. He paused. “Of course, the bigger problem is that if we can’t get on the road soon, we’ll never get to Shallix’s office before sunup. And I don’t particularly fancy the idea of breaking and entering in the light of day.”

  He slipped out into the night.

  By the time we followed him out, Junkman Sam had already squirmed halfway under the vehicle. His generous belly and stumpy legs protruded from beneath the front bumper.

  “Ja nadejus’ tebe deti v sup polujut!” he snarled.

  I didn’t need to understand a word of Russian to know he wasn’t happy. I looked to Alicia for a translation.

  “An old Russian saying,” she informed me. “It’s more or less ‘I hope your children poop in your soup.’ ”

  Sam wriggled out from under the RV. “Half of our electrical system was torn out by that stump.”

  “Can you fix it?” I asked.

  He tugged on his earlobe thoughtfully. “Let’s hope so.”

  Alicia looked at the lights of a passing car. “Can’t we just hitchhike to Schenectady or something? Or call a cab?”

  Sam shook his head. “My equipment is in the motor home. I think we’re going to need it if we want to hack into Shallix’s records and learn the full extent of his plot.”