Sonic the Hedgehog--The Official Movie Novelization Read online

  “Gotta find a new challenge to keep the old feet sharp, Sonic,” he said to himself. Being undefeated was getting boring. Occasionally, he thought it’d be good to be noticed, to talk to someone again. But that was impossible. Years ago, Sonic made a promise to never be seen by a human. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t push that promise to the very edge.

  The hedgehog skidded to a stop and unloaded a few bags of chips, a pair of black sunglasses, and a handful of change onto a crooked shelf with the rest of his collection. It joined his stack of near-mint-condition Speed Demon comics, the lone Ping-Pong paddle he used to win the All-Time Hedgehog Versus Self Championship, and, of course, his old-school boom box.

  Sonic cranked his favorite song—a lightning-quick beat accompanied by wailing guitars. He kicked and screamed and danced across the rest of his makeshift home. The music echoed off posters of all the places he wanted to run to but could never risk going to. Sonic wished he could shove it in gravity’s face by running up the Eiffel Tower. He wanted to ricochet off the pyramids of Egypt like a pinball or dash the length of China’s Great Wall in a heartbeat. He had to settle for solo jams in the caves of Green Hills. At least they had good chili dogs here.

  Sonic struck the big note on his air guitar and slid into a dresser. Up on top, a gnarled old sack shook loose and landed on Sonic’s head. “Ouch!” He gripped his head and squeezed his eyes shut. And when Sonic opened them, he stared at what had spilled out of the sack.

  The rings. Longclaw’s last rings.

  He almost never took them out anymore. He’d been here on Earth so long now, the thought of warping to a stinky mushroom planet seemed insane. He was lonely here, sure, but he was hardly alone. At least there were still people all around him whose lives were like a movie he could control. Sonic was a living fast-forward button.

  Take old Crazy Carl, prowling his property every night and snapping bear traps open to catch the alien life-form he knew was just out of reach. That guy was a riot!

  Whooosh! Sonic would blow like a gust of wind behind him, and set off every trap in sight. Ka-Shink! Ka-Shink! They’d snap off like popcorn.

  “I know you’re here!” Carl would howl and stomp around wildly. “I know you’re real!”

  “No, I’m not!” Sonic would call back as he blasted into the hillside. Such good times they had.

  But no one kept Sonic’s attention like Donut Lord—Green Hills’ one-man action force. The affable, pastry-eating do-gooder was the best of what the town had to offer. Dedicated to justice. Friendly with everyone. Ready for anything. And then there was his animal-loving, yoga-expert wife. Sonic called her Pretzel Lady because of how she could bend, but she seemed like the kind of person just flexible enough to see he wasn’t a danger. The kind of person Longclaw had never guessed could live on earth.

  Sonic almost felt bad whenever he’d zip through their lives at superspeed, leaving only a trail of weirdness behind him.

  “Why do I do it, Doc? I don’t know,” said Sonic. “Why does the sun shine? Why are the keys of a keyboard not in alphabetical order? Why do they put those little bags of buttons in new pants when they know you’re going to throw them out?”

  “Een-teresting . . . and you have never considered zat zese ‘jokes’ are merely distractions from zee real issues you are dealing with?”

  “Of course they are,” Sonic said while checking out his legs on the psychiatrist’s couch. “I mean, I don’t even wear pants.” He turned his face serious for just a moment and continued.

  “Donut Lord . . . he’s a man of action, just like me. Any time my speeding around town causes trouble, he always finds a way to keep the peace. He helps me stay out of the spotlight, even when he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. Donut Lord is basically my wingman. But he’s more than that, too. He’s . . . he’s my best friend.”

  It sounded silly to say it out loud at long last, but it still felt right. “You can have friends, even if, well . . . even if they technically don’t know you exist. That’s not so weird. Right, Doc?”

  In a flash, Sonic spun around the small couch and materialized in the psychiatrist’s chair, complete with a pair of heavy spectacles and a paper goatee glued to his face. This was a totally normal activity he did and not at all the result of his extreme solitude. “It eez not so abnormal, zat is so,” Doctor Sonic said with a raised eyebrow. “But considering your erratic actions of late, do you fear zat your prolonged isolation is making you a bit crazy?”

  Whoosh! He was himself again and sitting up on the couch. “Crazy? Me? No way, Doc, you got me all wrong! And on an unrelated note . . . wow, look at the time. Gotta go catch the big game!” He jumped up.

  Sonic tore out of the window, leaving behind only a swirl of papers, and he hit the streets of Green Hills as evening fell. He couldn’t shake the worry he’d had since he saw Donut Lord and his wife celebrating moving out of town.

  With his fur itching for action, the hedgehog skidded into a hiding spot outside the Green Hills junior high baseball diamond. The summer’s last traces of a little league showdown was a perfect distraction. At least for a little while. When the game wrapped, winners high-fived in the parking lot, and losers made plans to drown their sorrows at the ice-cream parlor. By the time the people had fully split, Sonic took to the diamond and swung a forgotten bat around with one arm.

  If talking to one superspeed version of himself wasn’t enough to clear his mind, maybe taking on nine Sonics would do the trick.

  He dug his heels into the batter’s box and called the play-by-play. “Bottom of the ninth, tie score. And exactly who you want at the plate with the game on the line: Sonic.”

  Zip! He kicked up a cloud of dirt, ascending the pitcher’s mound in a blink. “But staring him down from the pitcher’s mound is the most fearsome southpaw in Green Hills: also Sonic.”

  Swoosh! He tore out to the box of the third-base coach and called out encouragement. “Focus, Sonic. If you win this game, you’ll be the most beloved kid in Green Hills! Hit it to the guy in left. He’s a real space case.” Zang! Out to left field, where he stared into the sky and picked his nose.

  “Ugh. I can’t even with that guy.” Pitcher Sonic sneered and wound up for the pitch.

  With an arm faster than lightning, Sonic sent a crackle of speed energy out of his fingertips and then raced it to home plate, where he picked up the bat and swung . . .

  Cracka-thoooooom!

  The blur of a bat connected with his pitch and sent shockwaves across the field. “Yes, yes, yes!! I did it! YES!! Did you see that?!?” Sonic cheered as he sped around the bases in two blinks of an eye. But as he dove headlong into home plate, the ripples of motion faded away, and there was no one to cheer with him.

  “Alone,” he said at last. “I really am alone . . . forever.”

  Sonic couldn’t stand it anymore. He ran with nowhere to go and found himself rounding first. In an instant, he hit home plate again and started all over. With each lap around the diamond, his red sneakers chopped deeper into the dirt. He made a lap in a blink. Then in a heartbeat. Then in the moment between seconds. And the faster he went, the more his fur and quills tingled with that chaotic blue energy. Faster . . . the air wavered in the heat . . . faster . . . streaks of electric light formed a diamond-shaped vortex . . . faster . . . the world became a blur of hot white lines and then . . .

  KA-BOOOOM!

  The entire field exploded, knocking even Sonic off course and into the dirt. He squinted and just caught a massive wave of blue chaos energy shooting up and out across the sky. And then everything went dark.

  “I never went that fast before,” he said in disbelief. “This is . . . not good.”

  The hedgehog spun through town, finding pitch-black houses and dark streetlights everywhere. The shock of his outburst must have burned out the electrical grid for all of Green Hills. Sonic slowed up around Donut Lord’s house. It wa
s as dark as everywhere else in town, but he could hear his friend’s voice from inside.

  “I know, I know. Everyone in town has called,” the Donut Lord said loudly and clearly into his phone as he stumbled outside to his cruiser. “Call Gill to see if he’s located the downed line. We’ll find out what happened one way or another.”

  The man stopped and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a long blue quill—Sonic’s quill—and his eyes opened wide as it glowed with blue energy.

  So that was that. Sonic had finally stepped over the line, and now the humans would be coming for him. His mind raced to the bag of golden rings back at his cave. Would he have to finally take Longclaw’s advice? Was it time to warp to another world and leave Green Hills behind?

  “No. No way,” he said. “It won’t come to that. I mean, even after all this, what human could possibly track me down?”

  Robotnik knew the odds of an event like that. He’d charted every possibility, run every statistic, crunched every number. He knew this was almost impossible. He was Robotnik. Knowing everything was his job. Now if only those pinheads at the Pentagon would stand aside and let him do it.

  His mobile lab rumbled as he pulled off the highway and onto the grassy outfield near ground zero. Robotnik had been contacted twelve hours after the incident. Twelve hours since an electrical shockwave exploded out of Podunk Hills and caused chaos for over eight hundred miles. The defense grid collapsed for fifteen minutes. Electrical shortages reached from St. Louis to the Colorado Rockies. Four satellites in low-Earth orbit burned out. And then twelve hours later, they finally called him in. The fools!

  Robotnik stepped out of the armored vehicle and adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses in the midday sun. His mustache shone above his lip, not one hair out of place, and his red lab coat fluttered dramatically. He looked like a superior specimen by any classification. Now to show the yokels that he was.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he barked as he strode across the baseball field with Agent Stone a step behind.

  “That’s me. I’m Major Benningto—”

  “Nope. Wrong. I’m in charge,” Robotnik said, lifting a finger to the stubby-looking military man. “This is a Class Five stellar electrical incident—a coding reserved for only the most unexplained phenomenon. And when a Class Five event is registered, they don’t turn over command to G.I. Jerk. They call in someone with the brainpower to operate more than a pop gun.”

  “And that would be you, Mister—?”

  Robotnik snapped his fingers. He was done with this half-wit. Agent Stone stepped up to complete the crude work of speaking to lesser minds.

  “DOCTOR Robotnik is the Defense Department’s top engagement analyst,” Stone said in a clipped tone so beautiful it was almost mechanical. “He has five PhDs, an IQ you couldn’t count to, and control over drone technology so revolutionary, your grunts won’t touch it for ten years. In a crisis incident such as this, all chains of command bend to his jurisdiction. In short, Major, you’re basic. Stand aside.”

  Robotnik surveyed the baseball diamond as a quartet of lackeys rolled his control board to his side. There was a deep rut dug around the baselines, and no sign that the explosion came from a single source. Intriguing. Somehow, little Podunk Hills contained something that his past jobs (inciting rebellions in foreign countries and spying on every computer on planet Earth) did not—there was a real challenge here.

  “Agent Stone, I’m initiating a sweep sequence. Ten miles in every direction should suffice.”

  Robotnik hacked away on his keyboards with reckless abandon, and his drones hummed to life. The whirring of their blades calmed his nerves and brought a crooked smile to his face. Machines were not like his buffoonish handlers in Washington. They did as they were told with precision and efficiency. And they didn’t smell like sacks of sweaty meat.

  “Yes, scour every inch, my little botniks,” he said as miles of data scrolled across his glasses. “Leave no stone unturned. Ferret out our sticky-fingered attacker so he can be punished like a sick little monkey.”

  The drones tore through the sky and dove deep into the foliage of the surrounding forest. Their infrared scanners swept across rocks, leaves, and brambles. In minutes, they’d gone miles from ground zero and swung back again, with beeps and bloorps transmitting every detail back to Robotnik’s wild eyes.

  And then, in an instant, the needle jumped out of the haystack and poked him in the nose.

  “Agent Stone, do you see anything useful in this image?” Robotnik said, zooming in on a section of dirt no bigger than a square foot.

  “Nothing at all, sir.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re only human.” Even his deadpan yes-man could not compete with the beauty of his botniks.

  Robotnik zoomed in on the faint outline of a footprint at the heart of the image and began twisting and warping it with his control board. In moments, a 3-D image of a shoe was before him, and with a dramatic swipe of his hands, the shoe split apart to reveal a tiny paw—more complex than a forest creature’s mark, with large flat pads perfect for running.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked the Major, again revealing the depths of his ignorance.

  “It’s nothing that you could imagine,” Robotnik said. “I have determined the precise height, weight, and spine curvature of the creature that left this track . . . but my computer can’t find a single match for it anywhere in Earth’s animal kingdom. This power outage was no terrorist attack. This is something else. But worry not, my little dunces. Robotnik can track the source of this unclassified miscreant.”

  Robotnik pressed the controls hard, and his drones rose in formation above his head and shot off into the distance, toward a small cave on the outskirts of town.

  Tom took the first calm moment he had since the blackout hit last night and used it to plan his escape. Across his kitchen counter, he spread a large map of the western United States with a thick star drawn around San Francisco in red marker. It went well with the poster of the city skyline Maddie had hung in the garage. All he had to do was figure out the quickest highway route, and he’d be on his way to her.

  “It was crazy, honey,” he said into the phone as he scanned the map. “The whole town went dark. It was like a sign telling me to get out of Dodge.”

  “Far be it for me to get in the universe’s way, but I don’t want you driving out here after a night running around Green Hills making sure no one was hurt,” came Maddie’s voice on the line.

  “Nah, I wasn’t out that late,” he said. “Besides, they mostly wanted me to save the food from spoiling in their fridges.”

  “I’m serious, Tom. You can wait to find a cheap flight in a few days.”

  “It’ll be fine. I’ll take my time,” he said and traced a path in red. “It’ll only take me two days. Just me and the open road and not one thought for Green Hills or its paranoid theories or its . . .”

  Whump!

  “Raccoons!” Tom’s eyes lit up as the noise from the garage settled. “They may have made it inside, but they’re in for a surprise.” He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a black tranquilizer gun on loan from the department.

  “Tom Wachowski, your surprise better not be one of those industrial tranq darts,” Maddie said, reading his mind. “Those animals are just hungry. Also, those darts are for bears.”

  “Of course not. This is just a scare tactic. Love-you-honey, bye!” Tom cut the call off with a swipe of his thumb as Maddie protested. But he knew what he was doing. He just had to shoo the critters off. Perhaps with a warning shot.

  Tom crept toward the garage as if he were about to kick the door down to some kind of underworld hideout. That’s the kind of thing he’d be doing all day in San Francisco, he was sure. “These raccoons put my partner in the hospital,” he narrated like one of his favorite movies. “But they can’t escape justice forever.”

 
As he pulled the door open slowly, a few more boxes slid off a high shelf, and Tom heard another sound—a tiny voice. Did these things somehow turn on the radio?

  “Just think of a place. Throw the ring. Think of a place. Throw the ring,” the high-pitched voice repeated. “Come on, remember what Longclaw said . . . If they find you, go to the next planet. Even if it is boring, and smells weird, and your only companions will be mushrooms of some kind.”

  Tom spun around the corner and leveled the tranquilizer gun on a pile of fallen boxes just below his San Francisco poster. “SFPD pending background check,” he cried out. “Paws in the air where I can—”

  And then the electric blue hedgehog looked up at him. It raised its hands—it had hands! It tried to look innocent. “Uh . . . meow?”

  “AHHHHHHH!” Tom screamed and the creature yelled back in kind. Before he knew it, his trigger finger snapped and a dart shot straight into the animal’s neck. It stumbled, its eyes both surprised and suddenly glassy, and it tossed a large golden ring into the air. That’s when things got crazy.

  The ring hung in midair in Tom’s garage, a faint glow rising to an array of sparkles. Through the middle of the ring, Tom could see his poster of the San Francisco skyline with the Transamerica building dead center. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t just a picture; it was more like a window into the height of that tower. Tom reached out his hand to touch the rooftop when the hedgehog finally tipped over and passed out. The ring dropped to the ground. In a second, a brown bag dropped from the animal’s paw and slid into the golden window created by the ring.

  ZAM!

  Tom blinked and the ring was gone. Its vision of the Transamerica building faded, and all that was left was an overgrown, talking forest creature. A blue one at that.