Ignatius MacFarland (26 page)

“I used to see that path when I was staying in that stupid White House,” said Karen as she furrowed her brow. “Never thought anything of it. That must be the route they bring the gold in on.”

Just as she said that, we saw a cart that was covered with a dark cloth come over the hill, being pushed with great effort by two giant babies. One of the babies had a big white spot on its forehead that stood out as the first glow of the dawn light hit it.

“Hey, look,” said Feep Feep as he squinted to see the big purple baby. “Isn’t that Mmph?”

Peepup strained his neck forward, as if the extra couple of inches would help him see better. “Yeah, and that’s Hmm next to him.”

Then one of the rolling potato bugs came over the hill behind them, spinning the wagon wheel with the blades on it as we heard the faint sound of him saying, “C’mon, keep moving,” in this really weird rumbly voice.

“They’re slaves?” said Karen, more to herself than to the rest of us.

“Mmph and Hmm wouldn’t be working for them because they
wanted
to,” said Peepup, shaking his head in disbelief. “They hated the army more than any of our other members.”

“Chester’s running a
labor
camp?” Karen said to herself again, although she said it so loudly and angrily it could easily have been intended for the rest of us to hear.

Just then, the gold cart hit a rise in the path and got stuck. The babies pushed to get it over the hump but were having trouble. The guard’s eye got a mean look and he rolled full force into the waddler nearest him, knocking the big baby hard into the back of the cart. The baby made a low bassy sound of pain, and then pushed with all his might. The cart rolled over the hump and they continued pushing it down the path.

I looked at Karen, Peepup, and Feep Feep. They all looked pretty angry.

We had to do something. This wasn’t how things should have been in this frequency.

I just had no idea what we were going to do.

33

WORKIN’ IN A GOLD MINE

The sun had now come up over the horizon and its golden rays were beginning to light up the hill as we slowly and carefully crawled through the tall thick reddish grass. We could see that there were guards up on top of the White House who would occasionally look over to make sure nobody was sneaking through the field, which was exactly what we were doing. Unfortunately, there were no tunnels that led this way for us to hide in as we moved and, even if there were, we had no idea where we were going. The area over the hill was a place the creatures of Lesterville never went, since it led toward the valley where the gorilla guys came from. Ever since Mr. Arthur started up his army, nobody from Lesterville ever came anywhere near the White House and wouldn’t dare try to go into the fields and hills behind it. It was just easier and safer to stay in town and not cause trouble.

It took us quite a while to get to the top of the hill, since we had to stay so low to the ground and keep checking back to make sure the guards weren’t watching. Fortunately, they didn’t really seem to care too much about things on the ground at that moment and were scanning the skies most of the time, which I assumed meant they were keeping an eye out for the flying people. I honestly didn’t know why Herbert Golonski cared about the flying people seeing what he was doing with his gold mine, since the flying people didn’t care what happened on the ground. But I guess, knowing that their entire city had been destroyed by Mr. Arthur’s army, Golonski must have figured that the flying people might be mad enough to take some kind of revenge.

I looked up at the sky. It was empty.

“Where’s Foo?” I whispered to Karen. “I thought she was helping us.”

“Don’t get attached to her,” said Karen. “The flying people are weird. They’re your friends one day and then the next day they act like they don’t even know you. Foo wanted to help me get you out of Arthur’s house and then she disappeared. All the flying people disappeared. Just when you’d think they would want to stand up for themselves and get involved, they all just fly away. They care so little about things on the ground that they’re willing to just leave even after the army attacked them and destroyed everything they had. I don’t think I’ll ever understand them.”

I thought it was kind of weird, too, until I remembered that we had a bird’s nest in our backyard last year that our neighbor’s cat climbed up to and knocked off the tree branch. The nest fell onto the ground and then the cat ate the eggs that were in it. It was really gross and sad and I kept wondering if the bird whose nest was destroyed was going to come and attack the cat or rebuild the nest in our tree again. But it never did. My dad ended up accidentally running the nest over with his lawn mower and the bird never rebuilt his or her house in our tree. So I had to figure that maybe things that can fly, whether they’re animals or people, just find it easier to cut their losses and move on.

I guess if I could fly, it’d be really easy to just fly away from my problems, which in a way I tried to do when I built that rocket. And it worked, because I definitely left the problems I was worried about, like Frank Gutenkunitz and all the mean kids in my school, back in our frequency. But then I found a whole new world of problems.

Man, sometimes I feel like I can’t do anything right.

Before I could think too much about all this, we got to the top of the hill, which was good because instead of thinking about all my little problems I immediately saw that there were a lot of creatures who were having some really
big
problems.

Stretching out before us in the valley was what looked like a huge prison camp. There was a big scary fence running around the place and lots of guards on watch. Inside the fence was this huge area that looked like some sort of coal mine or something. There were mountains of dirt piled everywhere and tons of holes in the ground. We saw lots of mole creatures crawling in and out of the holes. The ones who were coming out pushed big buckets of dirt ahead of them, which giant babies took and dumped out into these big trays that had mesh on the bottom. The babies then picked up the trays and shook them back and forth so that the dirt sifted through the mesh and then there’d be a bunch of pieces of gold left inside.

The babies then took the trays and dumped the gold pieces into these big heavy bowls that were sitting over fires. The gold melted as some weasels and feels stirred the pots with big metal poles. They then poured the gold into molds. When the gold cooled off, they turned over the molds and gold bars dropped out. Finally, the babies picked up the gold and put it on this big thing that sort of looked like a huge bathroom scale.

Standing next to the scale was Herbert Golonski! He was holding a pad of paper and looked at the readout on the scale and wrote down something on his pad and then the babies took the gold bars off the scale and piled them up on carts and covered the carts with cloth and then two of them would push the cart out of an opening in the fence that led to the path. They were always followed by one of the guards, who yelled at them and threatened him with his weapon and pushed them and generally did mean stuff, even though it didn’t look like the babies really needed anyone to tell them to push the cart since they didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter, anyway.

“There’s all our friends!” said Feep Feep in a loud whisper.

“This is unbelievable!” was all that Karen could say as she stared at the gold camp with her mouth hanging open. And she was right. It was pretty crazy.

BA-BOOF! Suddenly dirt exploded up from everywhere as a bunch of gorilla guards jumped up out of their own secret tunnels in the ground and landed in a circle around us. Then they pointed their swords at us, the gleaming sharp tips about one inch from our heads.

We were officially in big trouble.

34

THE GOLD HITS THE FAN

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Anti-Art.”

We looked and saw Mr. Arthur coming over the hill. A bunch of gorilla guards were behind him, as well as the big baby who had been guarding the White House gate. The waddler was wearing his suit and tie and had on a big pair of sunglasses so that he looked like a huge, swollen version of a secret service agent.

“Hello, Karen,” said Mr. Arthur as he stepped through the guards and stood in front of her. However, he suddenly seemed to remember what had happened the last time he had gotten too close to her and so quickly pulled one of the gorilla guards in front of him for protection. “Long time no see.”

“Yeah, long enough to open a gold mine and turn lots of your loyal subjects into slaves,” she said to him with a look of contempt on her face.

“Those aren’t loyal subjects. They’re people who broke the law.”

“What’d they do?” she asked with a smirk. “Not kiss your butt enough?”

I saw Peepup and Feep Feep exchange a look between them that showed they couldn’t believe Karen was talking to Mr. Arthur that way. And Mr. Arthur clearly wasn’t too happy about it, either.

“I’m trying to be nice here,” said Mr. Arthur, looking annoyed. “I could have you working down there in two seconds if I wanted to. You’ve broken the law more than any of them.”

“You’re unbelievable, Chester,” she said as she shook her head. “I really think you’ve lost your mind. You’re stealing
gold
now?”

This seemed to throw him. He got a surprised look, then said, “I’m not stealing anything.”

“Yeah? What are you doing, then? Just digging up all that shiny yellow stuff because you think it looks pretty?”

“I needed something for the prisoners to do and it was decided that we might as well mine the gold out of there, since there’s so much of it.”

“And who decided that? Herbert Golonski? Where did that guy come from? What, was he in the house with you when you blew it up?”

“No,” said Mr. Arthur, starting to sound like he was getting mad.

“Then who is he?”

“None of your business.”

“What are you, five?” she said with a snort. “Sorry to make you talk about your boyfriend.”

“Hey, he’s a boy and he’s my friend but he’s not my boyfriend!” Mr. Arthur snapped at her, sounding very much like Ivan’s little sister at that moment. He then looked around at the guards self-consciously. You could tell this conversation wasn’t really going the way he had planned. “And
I
make all the decisions around here. You got that? I’m the
president,
you know.”

“Yeah, you’re one hell of a president.” She laughed. “Gold’s not even worth anything here, you know. The creatures couldn’t care less about it.”

“If I
say
it’s worth something, it is. Gold’s only valuable in our frequency because a long time ago somebody decided it should be.”

“So that’s your goal as president?” Karen laughed. “To make gold valuable here?”

“Hey, I’d worry a little more about yourself right now,” Mr. Arthur said, losing patience. “Because you are in big trouble.”

Karen just shook her head and gave him the you’re-an-idiot look. “I thought you were pathetic because you turned this village into some kind of plagiarized vanity project, but now I find out you’re just doing it to get rich back in our frequency? That’s really lame, man, even for you.”

Mr. Arthur stared at her, thrown. “I’m not taking gold back to our frequency.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

Mr. Arthur looked at me, immediately figuring out that I was the one who told her and looking a bit freaked out that I had discovered his secret operation. Then he leaned in to us and whispered in a really exasperated voice, “Look, I didn’t even come up with that plan, okay? It was Herbert.”

Karen stared at Mr. Arthur for a second, then burst out laughing. “You’re such a loser, Chester. Even when you’re doing something evil, it’s not your own idea.”

Mr. Arthur stared at her with his mouth hanging open like someone had just sucked all the air out of his lungs. All the guards kept glancing at each other, then back at Mr. Arthur, wondering what he was going to do next. Or
if
he was going to do anything next.

Which was right when Herbert Golonski walked through the crowd of guards.

“Mr. President, you’re not going to let anyone talk to you like that, are you?” Herbert said as he shook his head like a teacher who had just found out you had cheated on an exam. “Especially not a criminal.”

“Hey, Chester, your boyfriend’s back,” Karen said with a smirk. “Maybe he brought you a gold necklace or something.”

Herbert looked at Karen, walked up to her, and smiled. But it was one of those smiles that said he didn’t think she was funny. “Your president is a very fair and patient man, my dear. But I wouldn’t expect his patience to last much longer.”

“Okay,” Karen said slowly as she narrowed her eyes at Herbert, “first of all, he’s not
my
president, nor is he the president of anything. He’s just some failure who tried to blow himself up and because of that, he ended up in this frequency where he is now passing off all the best achievements of actual smart and talented people as his own. Second, if I’m the criminal, how come it’s you who’s stealing gold from this place? And third . . .”