Read Alice in Zombieland for Free Online Page A

circle of stinking toadstools, all pale and striped with red and brown, were spread round the trees near her, some quite large, in fact, big enough for her to sleep beneath if she ever wanted to sleep in such a musty and frightening place. ‘I might have liked to take a bite of him, instead, if I’d only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is, what?’
          The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the tall foreboding trees, all dark and shadowed within their vast skeletal branches and but she did not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
          She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the pale, smelly mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large black wurm, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly supping on a freshly dismembered human ear which it had stolen from the nearby graveyard and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.

Chapter V

    Advice from the Conqueror Wurm

          T he Wurm and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence. The Conqueror Wurm’s body was long and segmented, and the color of wet ash, and smelled somewhat like a dead mouse that Dinah had once brought home to lie at her feet last year. The mouse, all rotting flesh and patchy gray fur, had been dead for quite some time. The Wurm smelled as if it had as well. Or perhaps, Alice thought, it’s what it chooses to eat that makes it smell so badly.
          At last the Wurm took the half-chewed human ear out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. ‘Who are you ?’ said the Wurm.
          This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
          ‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Wurm sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
          ‘I can’t explain myself , I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’
          ‘I don’t see,’ said the Wurm.
          “I feel strangely cold all the time and I’m so dreadfully hungry for the bits and pieces of other living things. I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing”
          ‘It isn’t,’ said the Wurm, ‘hard to explain in the least. Quite natural here, young lady.’
          ‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice; ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’
          ‘Not a bit,’ said the Wurm, writhing its long gray body into a loop so to better face Alice.
          ‘Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,’ said Alice; ‘all I know is, I feel very queer indeed. Not myself.’
          ‘You!’ said the Conqueror Wurm contemptuously. ‘Who are you ?’
          Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Wurm’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said,
    very gravely, ‘I think, you ought to tell me who you are, first.’
          ‘Why?’ said the Wurm.
          Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of