Voodootown

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Camo

She stopped in the neighbor's yard, turned to see dolls hurrying from her driveway.  There were more of them on the street and she saw collars on all of them.  An oak tree stood at the end of the block and she hurried toward it.  She jumped off her good foot and grabbed hold of the bark.  One probe with her right foot told her that it was nearly useless, so she climbed up with her hands and just one leg.  After she made it into the middle of the tree, she crawled out onto one limb and stretched out along it.  She dangled her head between a crook of two branches to watch the collared dolls below.

Several of them passed under the tree.  She watched, waiting for them to keep going, to pass out of sight, but they stopped.  She looked through the leaves all around and saw that all of the collared dolls had stopped.  Without any signal that she could see, they all scattered and within a second, the street was empty.

Camo didn't move a fiber.  After a moment, she saw a lone doll creep down the center of the street.  It had nothing around its neck, nor a curled pin in its chest.  She recognized him.  It was Shakes.  They didn't know each other well, but had talked in Voodootown several times.  His human taught gym and coached football at Hehet's high school.

Shakes turned in a slow circle, then jerked his head to the left, to the right.  Camo saw the other dolls appear from all around and begin to move in on Shakes.

"Back off," he said.  Even to Camo, up in the tree, his voice sounded powerful.  As the ring of dolls closed in, Shakes set a hand on the ground.  She saw the road begin to bounce up and down, slightly at first, then harder.  The tree branches started to vibrate and cracks appeared in the pavement below.

The dolls began to lose their footing and tumble on the road, but one had leapt into the air before the quake began.  It hit Shakes as he knelt there, but he was ready.  He simply held up his other hand and when the doll made impact, it began to vibrate.  Within seconds, its clothing had fallen apart and right after that, the stitching holding the doll together unraveled.  It fell to the ground in a heap of cloth and loose stuffing.  The collar it wore clinked onto the road beside Shakes.

But Camo could see that it didn't intimidate the collared dolls at all.  Others began to jump for him.  They had been farther out, away from the force of the vibration, and must have had abilities related to jumping and flight.  Most leaped twenty to thirty feet to get to Shakes.  They hit him all at once, five dolls from different directions.  He let go of the ground, caught two of them with his hands, but the other three struck him and knocked him face down onto the street.

They wrenched his arms up behind his back and looked up.  Camo followed their eyes and saw the man in the suit walking toward the group.  He stopped over them and Camo had to look over his shoulder, but she saw him adjust his glasses.

"Good.  Good, I like this one," he said.

Shakes looked up from the ground.  "What the...What are you?"

Camo couldn't see the man's face, but from the way he turned his chin up, she felt like he was smiling.  She had always watched how others moved and held themselves.  In humans or dolls, it told her when there might be trouble.  All she could see on the ground was trouble.

The man opened up his medical bag, pulled out a jar.  "I'm a doctor."  From his pocket, he pulled a red candle, which he tossed to the doll with the pin in its chest.  He snapped his gloved hands over the wick and it sparked, billowed into an inch tall flame.  The doll leaned back while holding the candle steady.

Shakes struggled, tried to set his palms on the dolls who held him down as the man bent over him.  When the man grabbed him, Shakes began to writhe, but could only wheeze as the grip around him tightened.

The man brought up the jar and stuffed Shakes inside, then screwed on the lid.  Camo craned her neck to look through the leaves and made eye contact with Shakes for half a second.  She couldn't hear him, but saw his stitched mouth utter a word: Help.

She felt like a coward, the way she usually did, but much worse.  She saw the crowd of dolls, the man who called himself a doctor, all below her with Shakes trapped inside the jar.  There was nothing she could do, but she still felt like she should try.  She should try to be like Twister or Squat, who were always fighting to defend their humans.  Or even like Ju Ju, who protected Danica by taking the girl's pain away.

Then Camo realized that the only way she could protect her human, Hehet, was to not help Shakes.  If she did anything, that man and his dolls would capture her and Hehet would be alone.  She had to stay hidden.

But just staying in the tree wasn't enough.  She had to do something else to keep Hehet safe from this.  She didn't know what happened to a human after their doll was captured like this, just that it wouldn't be good.  When a doll was incapacitated, their human went nearly catatonic, was exhausted and vulnerable to all sort of influences until the doll healed.  Camo couldn't let that happen to Hehet.

She looked around; saw the man dropping red candle wax around the lid of the jar.  Shakes seemed to grow weaker with each drip.  She couldn't watch. 

Around the man, the dolls were loosely packed, and even more sparse further away.  She looked them over, looked past them to the houses and cars on the street.  Then she saw a storm drain several houses down.  The curfew had proved useless.  But maybe if she could get to that drain and get back to Voodootown, she'd be able to get some help.

Camo scooted back until she was fully out of sight, made herself blend completely into the bark and waited.