Free The Flinkwater Factor by Pete Hautman

formidable, but they were no match for the thing in Billy’s hands.He pulled the trigger, and an intensely bright beam of greenish-blue light shot out, melting the steel bars like a hot knife cutting through butter, sending out a spatter of bright orange globules of molten steel.
    It took him about thirty seconds to completely destroy the grate. The ends of the bars glowed orange. Curls of smoke rose up from the ground where the spatters had landed. Billy stepped out of the culvert, placing his feet carefully so as not to get a hotfoot. He pushed the goggles up onto his forehead and grinned at us.
    Blinking away afterimages, I said, “What was that ?”
    â€œAcetylene laser,” Billy said—as if a handheld acetylene laser was a perfectly normal accessory for a thirteen-year-old to be carrying around.
    Myke said, “Where  . . . how  . . .”
    Billy said, “I made it.”
    Have I mentioned that Billy George is a mad genius?
    â€œI thought it might come in handy some day,” Billy said.
    â€œHey, guys  . . . ,” Myke said.
    I ignored him, looking into the dark and exceedingly spooky sewer.
    â€œUm  . . . I’m not sure Redge wants to go in there,” I said.
    â€œGuys  . . .”
    â€œRedge will go anyplace we do,” Billy said. “You’re the one that’s scared.”
    â€œI’m not scared,” I said. But I was.
    â€œGuys!”
    I turned to see Myke pointing a shaking finger at something in the woods. At first I couldn’t see what he was pointing at.
    And then I did. It looked like a man—an extremely tall man—with a body made out of leaves and the head of a Rastafarian Wookiee, standing not thirty feet from us in the shadow of a cedar grove.
    â€œSasquatch!” I screamed. I grabbed Redge and dove through the sewer grate into the culvert. Myke was right behind me.
    Billy said, “Hey!” Then he saw what we had seen, and he was running too. We turned left, then right, then left again, and didn’t stop until we were all gasping for breath.
    â€œI  . . . think  . . . we  . . . lost him,” Billy said.
    We listened for the sound of Sasquatch footsteps.
    Dead silence.
    â€œMaybe Sasquatches don’t like sewers,” Myke said hopefully.
    â€œ Nobody likes sewers,” I said.
    I heard a whispery, scurrying sound.
    â€œWhat’s that ?”
    â€œNothing,” Billy said. “Just some rats.”

25

    In the Sewers
    The inside of a storm sewer is not as gross as you might think. All the really nasty stuff goes in a different system of pipes and ends up in the treatment plant. The storm sewer just carries runoff from the streets, and it hadn’t rained lately, so except for a few puddly sections, we didn’t have to do any wading. But that doesn’t mean it was pleasant. Our walk through the culverts and passageways took us past two extremely stinky, extremely dead raccoons, and way too many sets of beady rat eyes. I didn’t know Flinkwater had rats. We could hear them scurrying ahead of us.
    One good thing: With all those rats to think about I forgot to worry about the Sasquatch.
    Redge did not care for the sewer at all. He whined and growled and snarled and moaned—sometimes all at once. To my relief, he did notmistake the rats for squirrels. He just wanted to get out of there.
    So did I. The time we spent making our way through those wet, echoey passageways supplied me with nightmare material for the rest of my life—not that I needed it after our Sasquatch encounter.
    â€œDo you know where we are?” I asked Billy as we hit another intersection.
    â€œUh  . . . yeah, pretty much.”
    â€œPretty much?”
    â€œI think we go right.”
    We turned right and heard a massive amount of scurrying ahead of us.
    â€œActually, I think left would be better,” he said.
    I was ready to