NO PARENTS ALLOWED

Part II: Arithmetic and Memories

By Hunter Lambright

Little Shoppe of Horrors; Los Angeles

The name on the sign said it all. Within the rundown store could be found all types of misbegotten creatures. None like them had ever before been spawned on earth, and each one had its own special qualities. Some could jump ten times their height while others possessed sharp fangs or claws. Still more could stretch their bodies or sniff out people with just a hair’s scent to go on.

In the back part of the shop lived the Falcone family. Arturo Falcone, the man of the house, could always be found in corner room, drunk in his recliner with the television tuned to some graphic show, muttering curses at the creatures that spawned from his skin. His mutant power was his curse, as well as his family’s only income—from within his body, those creatures were born.

Whenever a new beastie popped out of his skin, Arturo would ring a bell and his sons would fetch a cage for the newest addition to their shop. Matti and Primo, twins no older than thirteen, were the businessmen. Whoever came into the shop was their responsibility. Mrs. Falcone did housework and would often disappear without warning. Matti and Primo suspected that she was addicted to gambling as much as their father was to alcohol.

It was late at night in the Little Shoppe of Horrors, but that was the usual venue. None of their customers had any legitimacy to come in during the day. Still, they rarely got customers, but when they did, the twins always made a sale.

The tinkle of the bell alerted Primo to the arrival of a customer. “Wake up, Matti,” he whispered. “We’ve got business. It’s the Buyer.”

Matti snapped to attention from the magazine he’d been dozing off to. They only knew this customer as the Buyer, but when they came, the Buyer always had a special order—and a very high budget.

“Good evening,” said Primo, careful to address the Buyer as neither “sir” nor “ma’am” just because he never had been able to tell just what the Buyer’s gender was. The cloak he or she wore covered their face with darkness and the voice would often fluctuate between high and low tones and pitches. Whoever the Buyer was, he or she definitely wanted their identity kept secret.

“I have a special order,” said the Buyer, cutting directly to the chase. “Do you have anything particularly poisonous? My only requirement is that it must be able to follow orders.”

Matti nodded. “Let me go check in the back. I think we may have just the thing.”

Primo nodded. He knew what his brother was thinking. It was time to bring out “Nice Boy.” Matti returned momentarily with a large cage that was covered in plastic.

“What is it?” the Buyer asked, the voice fluctuating from tenor to baritone within that simple sentence. “I can’t see a thing.” There was a sudden, vicious growling from the cage. “It sounds pretty bad.”

At the last word, the creature’s growling turned into enraged shouts. The cage rattled around on the table as the little beast tossed around inside. “Calm down, Nice Boy!” ordered Primo. He turned to the Buyer. “He doesn’t like the word ‘bad,’ as you can see.”

“I noticed,” said the Buyer dryly. “Remove the cover. I want to see what it looks like.”

Primo pulled off the plastic tarp that covered the cage. Nice Boy was a gruesome sight indeed. It was skin-colored, and only the size of a potato. Possessing only three legs—two in the back and one in the front—Nice Boy also had no eyes or nose. At the same end that had one leg (which the Buyer presumed was the front) was the mouth. The teeth were its most startling aspect. Each tooth was serrated and nearly four inches long. The teeth alternated, jutting out from the mouth and extending up and down along the “lips.”

“It’s…definitely not a looker,” the Buyer said. “That’s the poison dripping from the teeth, I take?”

“That’s it,” said Matti proudly. “I tested it on a rat that we caught in a trap. Took five seconds before the rat keeled over.”

The Buyer glanced at Nice Boy approvingly before reaching inside the cloak. The probing hand emerged, producing a wad of hundred-dollar bills. “I’ll take it. This should be enough?”

Primo counted the money. “Three grand? That’s…wow. Yeah, that’s fine,” he said, obviously blown away. “Just remember—to get it to listen, you have to say its name first. Then it’ll do whatever you tell it.”

“I’ll remember that,” said the Buyer, as Matti tranquilized the creature with a stun-gun and placed it into a smaller cage so the Buyer could take it along with him or her. The Buyer drew the smaller cage inside the cloak and turned toward the door.

“When things change,” the Buyer added, before finally leaving, “I’ll remember this place.” With that, the mysterious figure disappeared.

The Falcone brothers stared at the door for a few minutes after the Buyer left. Finally, Matti spoke up. “You’d better stash that money, Primo,” he said. “If mom finds it…”

“You’re right,” said Primo, peeling off two hundred-dollar bills from the wad. “We’ll tell her this was what we got from the sale.” He handed the two bills to Matti. Then Primo went to the corner and bent down, pulling up a floorboard. He carefully placed the money into the floor and turned to his brother.

“Who do you think the Buyer is?” he asked.

Matti shook his head. “We’ve done this stuff long enough to know the golden rule: Asking questions gets you killed, Primo. That’s good enough for me.”

Stein Residence

It’s never a good thing when the phone rings at midnight.

Victor Stein groggily picked up the phone. “Hello?” he mumbled into the receiver.

“Get up, Victor,” said Geoffrey Wilder. “We have a problem.”

“What’s wrong?” Victor asked, sitting up in bed. “Are the cops onto us?”

“No,” said Geoff. “Alex is missing.”

Victor groaned. “That’s your problem, Wilder. Why bother me?”

“Have you forgotten what tonight was?” Geoff asked maliciously.

At this, Victor laughed. “You woke me up because you believe that Alex witnessed the Rite of Blood? Ha! He’s sixteen, Wilder! I guarantee you that he’s off getting drunk or having a good time with some girl in the backseat of your car.”

“I’m glad you feel so good about the situation, Victor,” said Geoff coldly. “Especially when we consider the fact that the Minorus called me fifteen minutes ago. Nico is gone, too. The Yorkes are missing Gertrude. Catherine is calling the Deans and I’m calling you and Hayes. Is your son there or isn’t he?”

“What’s going on, Victor?” asked Janet Stein, waking up from the noise.

Victor shrugged. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’ll tell you in the morning.” He got out of bed and spoke into the phone. “I’m checking now.”

The door to Chase’s room was half open. From the light that spilled in from the hallway, Victor could make out his son’s body cocooned in his sheets. “He’s here, Wilder,” Victor whispered into the phone. “Whatever’s going on with the others, this running-away epidemic hasn’t spread to my house.”

“Check and make sure a warm body is under those covers, Stein,” said Geoffrey. His patience was being tried to the maximum.

Victor tiptoed into the room. He realized the truth before he even whipped the covers off the bed. Chase was not sleeping in his bed. Two pillows and a basketball were.

Geoff recognized the silence as a moment of realization. “Where’s the epidemic now, Stein?” asked Geoffrey. “It’s obvious that this isn’t an isolated incident. Your tech knowledge can work with my surveillance equipment, and then we’ll figure out what happened while we were all too busy killing that girl to realize that our kids were figuring out what their parents do for a living.”

The Hostel

Years ago, an eccentric man had a mansion built into the soft, marshy land within the rock outer limits of Los Angeles. During an earthquake, the mansion sank into the ground due to a massive sinkhole that opened underneath it. A coincidence? Perhaps not. A godsend? For the Runaways, of course it was.

“I can’t believe Chase knew about this place,” said Alex Wilder, trying to talk about anything except for what was most heavily on his mind. “It’s perfect right now…being off the map and all.”

Nico Minoru forced a smile. “I’m surprised Chase even reads, but when he told us he lifted the book from his dad…well, I wasn’t that surprised anymore.” Chase had explained to the group that he had read about the Hostel in a book.

Alex decided to give in. “I…look, we don’t want to talk about this, but I trust you more than the others. Are we going to believe our parents are killers and hide or are we going to see if they had a reason to do what they did?”

“They killed someone, Alex,” said Nico. “There’s no right or wrong here—it’s wrong no matter what.”

“What’s going on out here?” asked Gertrude Yorkes, poking her head out of the main entrance to the Hostel.

“We’re just talking about…you know…” Alex said, making a slicing motion across his throat.

“Okay then,” said Gert. “Molly’s conked out on one of those nasty excuses for beds while Chase is searching for some cash he has stashed. Karolina’s going to cook something, I think.” She turned to leave, but stopped herself.

“You know, if our parents are dressing up in costume and killing people, that’s probably not their only secret. Who knows what else they have in their secret lair or whatever,” she said offhandedly.

“What makes you say that, Gert?” Alex asked.

Gert looked into the open space of the cave thoughtfully. “When I was little, my parents always told me not to go into the basement—they said a monster lived there. Now that I know that everything else they told me is a lie, I want to know what made the growling noises.”

“That’s kinda creepy,” Nico reflected. “My parents never had anything like that, but their library had two sections—one section I could go into, one I couldn’t. They yelled at me for peeking inside the curtain once, and I didn’t end up seeing a thing. Do you think that’s part of their secret?”

“Anything’s possible,” Alex said. “I always knew my parents carried guns around just because concealed weapons only go so far with the ‘concealed’ part of the deal. Especially if you’re the same height as their pockets at the time. It wasn’t a great idea on their part. I think you’re onto something, Gert. This isn’t the only secret our parents had.”

“Just great…right when we think things can’t get any worse,” said Nico, “they always do.”

“How are you doing, Chase?” asked Karolina Dean, walking up to Chase Stein as he poked around inside the furniture to find something. “Is everything all right?”

Chase was silent for a second. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I just can’t find anything I had stashed here.”

“What are you looking for?” Karolina asked. “Maybe I can help.”

Chase frowned. “You wouldn’t happen to know what a bag of weed looks like? I just wanna get high and forget all of this happened.”

Karolina raised an eyebrow. “You’re right, I don’t know what a bag of weed looks like.”

Chase threw himself down on the old couch. “Do you know how hard it was to say good night to my folks before running off after I saw them kill that girl? Do you know how it felt to look those monsters in the eyes and say, ‘I love you’?”

Karolina sat down and put her hand on Chase’s knee. “Of course I do,” she said almost angrily. “But you know what? Molly had to do it too! If she can handle it, so can we. We have to be strong for the others or else we’re going to fall apart at the seams. I thought I’d be a kid forever, but now…now things just feel like my insides were ripped out because my parents aren’t the nice, loving people I thought they were! It’s just so hard to deal with—but we have to for the others. Don’t you get it, Chase? We’re the oldest. Alex may want to be the leader, but we’re the ones who have to make the decisions.

“Can you handle it?”

The Stein Residence

Geoff Wilder burst into Victor Stein’s office. “What have you found?” he blurted out, just as Victor was about to open his mouth.

“I’ve gone over the surveillance tapes,” Victor said, once he regained his composure. “Come here, take a look at these.” He pulled the first video up on the screen. “At 1:23 this morning, my son left through his bedroom window, climbed down the lattice, and took his van.”

“Was he the first one to leave?” asked Geoff.

Victor pulled up a new window. “This is your tape, Wilder. Your son left the house at 1:17 but he hung around outside for awhile, pacing. Then Chase picked up about fifteen minutes later. It goes like that at all of the houses. I’ve pulled Chase’s plate number from the van and sent it through Lieutenant Flores. They’ve sent it out through the wires and we’ll get them no matter how far they’ve gotten by now.”

Geoff grimaced. “Keep working,” he said simply, not bothering to commend his friend on his pseudo-success. Somewhat grumpy still, he turned on his heel and left.

Victor paused, his mouth still open from the revolution he’d been about to utter. “I…fine, then,” he said bitterly to himself. “I’ll keep their secrets to myself.”

The Hostel

The four older Runaways sat in a huddled group in the Hostel. Alex led the group in a hushed discussion—what would become of them now?

“So, look—our parents are the bad guys and now we’re on the run. They probably own the law, and there aren’t exactly all that many heroes around here,” said Alex quickly.

Karolina looked up. “They’ve been getting closer, especially with the Masters of Vile or whatever attacking…”

“But they aren’t close enough,” argued Alex. “We’re on our own here. We’re six kids without powers, without anything that our parents have.”

“We know that,” Chase said, his temper flaring. “What do you expect us to do about it, though? We’re six kids in L.A. We may not stick out like sore thumbs, but we hang out in the streets long enough asking for help, someone’s gonna drive by with a sawed-off shotgun hanging out the window!”

“Get real, Chase,” said Nico. “Alex and I talked. We know we can’t solicit for help. That’s why there’s only one thing we can do.”

“What’s that?” Chase asked.

“We have to go back home,” said Alex mysteriously.

Epilogue
Victor Stein’s Study

Victor Stein would divulge no more secrets. He lay slumped in his chair, pinholes from teeth layered around his neck. An untraceable poison had entered his bloodstream, causing near-instantaneous death as soon as the blood reached his brain and heart.

The Buyer stood outside, caressing the creature within its cage.

“Nice Boy,” they whispered. “Nice, Nice Boy.”