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didn’t look much better.
    I tucked my tail in between my legs to get more comfortable and nodded.
    “What do these buttons do?” Freddie asked before we took off.
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. Press them.”
    All of a sudden we were glowing red. Well, we weren’t, but the bike was. Grumbling had installed L.E.D. lights—pretty radical. However, one extremely un-cool feature was hard to ignore, a super-sized fry of a glitch. Burt had also pimped out this bike with a special under mount headlight. Imagine my horror when shining on the ground before us, like the signal from Batman, an evil clown head with a giant red nose lit up the pavement.
    “Ugh, turn that light off, please—”
    “Already done,” said Freddie. “I don’t think we want to draw that much attention to ourselves.”
    Like people wouldn’t notice a glowing red bike with a messed up alligator kid, a three-legged dog, and skinny, chicken-haired Freddie? I snorted into my hand.
    Freddie steered Cherry Pie forward, a worried frown spanning his big mouth. “I suppose I should take it slow…Whoa!” The bike jolted forward in one quick thrust.
    Apparently, going slow wasn’t an option. We took off.
    Sort of.
    Instead of going straight, we swerved from side-to-side and almost crashed into a couple of tents. And because of our panicked screams, we hadn’t gone unnoticed either. The melody of Stars and Stripes Forever blared from under the Big Top. It was always played in emergencies to alert the workers that something was wrong, like when one of the animals got loose. But this time it wasn’t Bobo or the chimpanzee they wanted to capture.
    It was me.
    Freddie white-knuckled the ape hanger handlebars. Just as we were about to turn onto the main road, a dozen midgets ran out of the cookhouse. Most of Grumbling’s midgets—even the women—sported buzz-cuts, black pants, a black t-shirt, steel-tipped boots, and the same nasty grimace on their dirt-encrusted faces. I didn’t know who was who half the time.
    Put it this way, these guys were nothing like the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.
    I’ve never heard such foul language—outside the cookhouse, that was. To make matters even nastier, they threw fish burgers at us. Fish burgers! A giant, stinky burger slapped the side of my face, oozing onto my lap.
    One of the midgets ran after us with a blowtorch. Regardless of his firepower, he couldn’t catch us. We rocketed off into the distance.
    As we careened down the street, I looked over my shoulder at the faded Grumbling’s entrance sign. I gulped, hoping that I’d never see it again. A hailstorm of emotions crashed down upon me. My body trembled so badly it rattled the sidecar. You name it, I felt it. Fear. Excitement. Dread. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I turned my head away from Freddie, bit down on my bottom lip, and tried to keep my feelings in check.
    I was leaving the only life I’d ever known.
    After what seemed to be an eternity, Freddie seemed comfortable on Cherry Pie—or at least that’s what the smile stretched across his face said. Besides hitting a couple of potholes and nearly crashing head-on into a pickup truck, things seemed to be going pretty well. I breathed out a big sigh of relief and stroked Snaggletooth on the head.
    Maybe we’d traveled a mile or two, maybe more, I didn’t know for sure. But we couldn’t keep driving without some kind of strategy. Because of the electrical jolts my tail felt, all I knew is that we had to get to New Orleans. Figuring we were safe and far enough away from the circus to put some kind of plan together, I tugged on Freddie’s shirt until he pulled over.
    Big mistake.
    While Freddie and I tried to figure out where we were, what I assumed to be just another big car sped toward us. But it wasn’t any old truck. The green glow of the H2’s under-carriage gave it away.
    “Freddie, kill the lights,” I screamed, hoping it wasn’t too late.
    Our bike went black.
    We took off