He had never been afraid of worms before Jane Prentiss started stalking the Archives, but then, he’d never had reason to. Now, however, he was adding them to spiders in his mental tally of least favorite things in the world and was never going fishing again. Not that those were the same kind of worms, but still.
Where were the others? He didn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess. Wile E had got separated from them early on, running out in a display of heroics Daffy would never have credited him with to alert Porky, who had stopped to pick up the tape recorder he’d dropped and not realized the worms were there. Porky had eventually burst through the wall of the room where Daffy and Tweety had been hiding from the worms, unable to say where Wile E was precisely but confident that he himself was unharmed, if lightheaded and far…well, loonier than usual due to having inhaled too much gas from the fire extinguishers, which weren’t nearly as harmless as they were on set—Daffy suspected the foam in the prop ones was actually shaving cream or something similar, and even if it was real, those weren’t carbon dioxide extinguishers…he guessed. It was irrelevant, really, but if he worried about that, he wouldn’t have to think about the worms.
There were so many worms.
The tunnels under the Institute were obviously stone catacombs, purpose built rooms and corridors and passageways, even if they didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Daffy had spent his fair share of time underground, traveling with Bugs in their younger days, mostly in the fifties and sixties, so he knew his rabbit tunnels. Actually, he thought he might have tripped over one, briefly, that had only been partially filled in. Still…these were built by humans, for humans, and as such they were probably way less logical than the straightforward attempts to get from point A to point B that Bugs usually dug, even if those did kind of meander.
They were also, and Daffy could not stress this enough, full of worms. Actually, that was probably an exaggeration; most of the worms were up in the Archives, and probably up in the rest of the Institute by now. But there were still some down in the tunnels, and they were faster, quieter, and way more aggressive than they were up in the Archives, something they had discovered while trying to navigate the tunnels when a whole bunch of them had appeared all at once. Daffy had screamed, Porky had screamed, Tweety had tried to go for a fire extinguisher, and in the chaos and confusion someone had dropped the flashlight and they’d all scattered. Or at least Daffy assumed they had scattered.
He had lost track of his assistants.
“It’th fine,” he told himself through gulps of air. “We’re the heroeth. Everybody will come through thmelling like rotheth. There’th going to be a miracle, a deuth exth machina, if you will, and the wormth will jutht…go away. Bugth will do thomething. He’th thurely got thomething up thothe exthpenthive thleeveth of hith. I’m not going back there, I’ll tell you that much. I’m a coward. Everybody knowth that.”
Everybody knows that. Daffy stopped and turned that phrase over in his mind. For the first time, he actually heard the way he said it—not in a matter of fact way, not dismissively, not even like he was trying to convince himself. It was…dejected. Resigned. He was a coward. Everybody knew it. Nobody expected anything more of him.
He ran over the roles he’d played in his lifetime, the cartoons he’d been in. What had he been? An annoyance. An antagonist. A schemer. A con artist. A punchline. A punching bag. A bully. Had he ever been a hero?
Could he ever be a hero?
Did anyone ever expect him to be one?
His assistants—Porky, Tweety…they had followed him. Him, not Duck Dodgers or Robin Hood or whoever else he was playing. There were no cameras, no scripts, no costumes, no props. This was the real world and this was a real job, and maybe they’d put up with him more than anything at the beginning, but they followed him, they listened to him. They counted on him. Didn’t they?
He took a deep, shuddering breath, then another. Then he straightened up and put his hands on his hips.
“Now, lithten here, Duck,” he said firmly.