Fear the Barfitron by M. D. Payne Read Free Book Online

off on the side of the bingo-ball cage.
    My stomach turned as I watched a glob of phlegmy goo drip off of the cage and onto the table. I took a deep breath, only to smell a putrid odor coming from the trash can behind me. I could feel something gurgling inside of me.
    As I tried to hold the erupting vomit volcano back, the old folks started to grumble and moan. They were not happy that their game had been ruined. I needed to get the game going again.
    I turned the handle, waiting for the familiar squeak, but it never came. I saw that some of the spider egg goop had fallen onto the joint where the ball and the mount met, lubricating the cage. As I turned the cage, the goop became warmer—and smellier. I could taste the puke rising in my throat.
    The Nurse must have noticed I was about to spew. He slapped me hard on the back and I swallowed it back down.
    The rest of the game went smoothly. I had called out a dozen or so more numbers when the hairier ofthe two hairy old men yelled, “BINGO!” and then howled excitedly. The howl took me by surprise. He looked so old that I didn’t think he would be able to make such a loud noise. It filled the Great Room and shook the windows. Even Horace stopped playing the organ to turn around and see what was going on.
    A Nurse headed into the back of the room to grab the old man’s bingo card and confirm that he’d actually won. When the Nurse got back there, he scratched his head and looked around. That’s when a few of the other old folks pointed up to the front of the room. A mangy dog held a bingo card in his mouth and limped his way toward me.
    The dog jumped up on the table and placed the card in front of me, then turned around and trotted shakily to the back of the room. I noticed that he had fur missing in great patches. He was a very, very old dog—the same one I had seen the first day. Where did he come from? Was he the old man’s dog?
    I looked down at the card, and confirmed that, in fact, the old man had won. I announced this to the crowd, which moaned a collective, “Noooooo…” as they realized that they wouldn’t win that round. I looked into the back of the room and saw the old man sitting back in his chair again. He waved excitedly as the rest of the crowd hissed at him.
    I looked around for the dog, and I couldn’t see it anywhere.

It was only Wednesday of the second week of the new school year, but it felt like I’d been in the sixth grade for two or three decades. Last night’s bingo marathon seemed to last forever. The old folks just couldn’t get enough. We must have played twenty or thirty games—and once it was over, the Nurses escorted me out the door. I never even got to do any investigating for my lebensplasm.
    What worried me were the old folks. The more time I spent with them, the more frightened I became. It wasn’t just that they were
like
monsters. I was beginning to believe that they actually
were
monsters. There was no other way to explain what I’d seen! The hairy old man who had won the first game howled and disappeared only to have an old dog appear in his place—anold dog with very human eyes.
Werewolf?
my tired mind asked. The old woman in the black shawl who had eaten the spider was the same woman I had seen in front of the cauldron on the first day. Was she going to use the spider legs in her leather pouch for a witch’s potion of some sort? And what were they planning for my lebensplasm?
    Still exhausted from the night before, I shuffled into my first class of the day: Mr. Bradley’s Social Studies. You could smell his breath before you even walked into the room. I don’t know what was more upsetting, the stench or his huge, swollen, red, bald, spotted head. It looked like some kind overripe fruit that could explode at any minute.
    I sat down next to Ben and didn’t even say hi. My mind was swimming from the day before. In my mind, I could see the eyes of the dog—they looked so human. The way the old witch—I mean