Mission Unstoppable (10 page)

“You’ll never get away with this!” Pep shouted.

The bowler dude chuckled to himself.

“Without any water, your bodies won’t be able to cool off. Your muscles will start cramping. You’ll get heat exhaustion and then heat stroke. You’ll feel dizzy and weak. Your temperatures will go up to 107 degrees. And then you’ll die. Hey, do you kids play golf? Sand traps have been the graveyard of many great golfers. And now one will be yours.”

He chuckled at his little joke.

“As soon as our parents realize we’re missing, they’ll be up here,” Coke said. “They’ll rescue us.”

The bowler dude shook his head and laughed.

“Your parents are used to you two running off,” he said. “By the time they get up here, you’ll be dead. I’ll simply cover your bodies with sand, and they’ll find nothing. You will have vanished without a trace.”

Pep was crying now. Coke was on the verge. He looked around desperately for a way to get out of the pit.

“What did we ever do to
you
?” Pep sobbed.

“Nothing. I do what I’m told, sweetheart.”

“By who?” Coke asked. “Who’s paying you?”

“That’s
my
business,” the bowler dude said.

Coke eyed the sword in the bowler dude’s hand. If only he could get hold of it.

“What’s with you and the old-time weapons?” Coke asked. “Swords. Blow guns. What, are they afraid to trust you with a
real
gun?”

“I’m kickin’ it old school,” the bowler dude explained. “There was something elegant in the weapons before the age of gunpowder. Killing with guns and dropping bombs from planes is too easy.”

“You’re crazy!” Pep shouted through her tears.

The bowler dude ignored her. He took a plastic water bottle out of his pocket and made a little show of leaning his head back to drain it slowly.

“Pretty hot up here today, eh?” he said, tossing the empty bottle into the pit. “Must be over a hundred degrees.”

“That’s littering!” Pep hollered at him. “Don’t you care about the environment?”

“Uh, I don’t think that should be our highest priority right now,” Coke told his sister.

“Don’t worry; the bottle will decompose in a few hundred years,” the bowler dude told them, “around the same time they find your bones. Ha-ha! They say life is the pits; but, in your case,
death
turned out to be the pits. So long, kiddies.”

As he slid his sword into his belt and turned to walk away, Coke yelled, “Wait!”

He realized that this assassin was, ironically, the only person who could save them. If the bowler dude left, there would be no way to get out of the pit. As long as they were talking, there was a chance to survive.

“Did you send us a coded message?” Coke asked. “Something about meeting you at a house on a rock?”

“If I have something to say to you, I’ll say it to your face,” the bowler dude replied. “I don’t send secret messages. Now, is there anything else you request? I’m a busy man.”

“Yeah,” Coke said, “could you help us out of this pit? We’re kinda stuck down here.”

The bowler dude laughed and clapped his hands. “I like that,” he said. “You retain a sense of humor even as you are going to die. I’m sure that we would have become friends if I hadn’t had to kill you. Ha-ha-ha!”

“I
told
you we should have brought the Frisbee,” Pep said to her brother.

“Yeah, a lot of good that would have done.”

“We could have thrown it at him,” Pep said, “or something!”

Coke was going to insult his sister’s Frisbee skills, but she had given him an idea. As the bowler dude turned to walk away again, Coke reached into his pocket. He pulled out the jar of sand he had collected for his mother. It was his only chance. He reared back, wound up, and heaved it at the bowler dude.

The jar hit him directly on the back of his head.

The bowler dude let out a brief yelp of pain and staggered backward a step. There was blood running down his neck. He went to put a hand on the wound, but it never got there. His knees buckled, and he fell backward and slid headfirst into the pit, next to the McDonald twins.

“Good throw!” Pep hollered.

“Quick! Grab his sword!” Coke said.

Coke was about to punch the bowler dude, but there was no need. He was
out
. The blow to the back of his head, combined with the fall into the pit, had knocked him unconscious. Pep grabbed the sword just to be on the safe side.

“Do you think he’s dead?” she asked.

“What am I, a doctor?” Coke said. “Who cares if he’s dead? Let’s get out of here!”

There was just one problem. They couldn’t climb out. The pit was too deep. When they tried to grab hold of the side and pull themselves up, they just got handfuls of sand. They tried making a foothold with their hands. They tried using the bowler dude’s unconscious body as a step. Nothing worked.

“Try using the sword!” Pep said desperately.

“What? You want me to carve steps into the sand?”

“No, dope!” she replied, taking the sword herself.

Pep made a mark on the side of the pit about three feet above the bottom. Then she stabbed the sword into the wall, hard. It slid into the sand about a foot deep.

Coke realized what she had in mind. He put his weight against the handle of the sword and pushed it another foot or so into the side of the pit. It held firm, with not much more than the handle sticking out.

Coke hoisted up his sister. She carefully put one foot on the handle of the sword and climbed out of the pit. Then she reached down and helped Coke climb out. They looked into the pit one last time to see the bowler dude lying there, motionless.

“I’ve played in the sand enough for one day,” Coke said.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

When they finally got back down to the parking lot, their parents were waiting impatiently.

“What took you so long?” Mrs. McDonald asked. “You were up there for a long time.”

“Did you kids have fun?” Dr. McDonald asked. “What was it like up there? Did it sound different?”

“It was
scary
, Mom,” Pep said. “Real scary.”

“Did you remember to fill the jar with sand?” Mrs. McDonald asked.

“Uh . . . yeah,” Coke replied weakly.

“So, where is it?”

“I . . . guess I left it up there,” Coke said honestly.

“How could you leave it there?” his mother asked, exasperated. “What is your problem? I swear, I can’t understand you kids. I don’t ask a lot. I ask you to do one simple thing. . . .”

“Can we just get out of here?” Pep requested. She wasn’t about to tell her mother that they used her souvenir to bonk a guy on the head and very possibly kill him.

They piled back into the RV and drove away, serenaded by the sound of the singing sand in the distance.

Chapter 15
I’ll Be Watching You

A
s the McDonalds drove back on Lovelock Highway up to I-80, the twins sat without saying a word. Suddenly they realized how naive they had been. They had thought that once they’d gotten on the road with their parents, their troubles would be over. They had thought they would be safe in the RV. Who could bother them in the deserts of Nevada? Their parents would protect them.

Right.

Coke felt the back of his head. There was a GPS chip buried in there somewhere, he remembered. Bones had staple gunned it into his scalp. But who knew where Bones was now? He didn’t show up at the sand dune to help them. That bowler dude guy had said that Mrs. Higgins had “taken care of” their friends. Maybe Bones and Mya weren’t even alive anymore.

Coke looked out the window at the big sky. Mrs. Higgins was working with those bowler dudes to kill him and Pep. That much he knew. Maybe satellites were tracking their position, following their every move, listening in on every conversation.

What had they gotten themselves into?

He fiddled with his deck of cards as these thoughts were running through his brain. The cards had become his security blanket in a way. Just holding them calmed him. Pep sat with her eyes closed. She was shaken, traumatized by the incident at the top of Sand Mountain.

Dr. McDonald pulled on to I-80 and announced that his goal was to make it across Nevada by the end of the day. It would be about 320 miles.

“How about a travel game to pass the time?” Mrs. McDonald piped up cheerfully. “I’ll name a place, and you guys have to think of a different place that starts with the last letter of my place. Got it? I’ll start. Vietnam.”

“Miami,” said Dr. McDonald.

“Islip,” said Mrs. McDonald. “It’s a city in New York State.”

“Punjab,” said Dr. McDonald. “It’s a region in India.”

“What about you kids?” Mrs. McDonald hollered behind her. “Don’t you want to play? Get into the spirit of it! Can you think of a place that starts with the letter
B
?”

“Boring,” said Coke.

He was right, too. There actually is a town in Oregon called Boring. Go ahead and look it up.

“We don’t want to play right now, Mom,” Pep said quietly. “We’re tired.”

“You kids are no fun at all,” Mrs. McDonald said.

She gave up the idea of playing a travel game and slipped a CD out of the visor in front of her—
The Best of Police
. The first song began to play. A guy was singing about how he would always be watching somebody—every breath they take, every move they make.

The song sent a shiver down Pep’s spine. Somebody
was
watching them. She took out her cell phone and punched in a text to her brother. . . .

Pep pulled out her pad and pencil to resume work on the unsolvable cipher they had found on the windshield that morning.

JNTET FFHNO LCDNB LTYUL VSEED
NTHTU EWNYI TOECO KOTEA
EORIEDPNOITOR

She tried reading every second letter to see if it made any sense that way. Then she tried reading every third letter, and then every fourth letter. Then she tried them all backward. It was just gibberish. She closed her eyes again.

People who have never been to Nevada tend to think it’s just a barren desert with two big cities: Las Vegas and Reno. In fact, it’s the most mountainous state in the nation and is filled with jagged canyons, lush valleys, gorgeous fields of alfalfa hay, sheep ranches, and cactus.
Lots
of cactus. And yes, the occasional rattlesnake, Gila monster, and kangaroo rat.

There are also a lot of cool places in Nevada, especially for people who gravitate toward the offbeat.

Like Coke and Pep’s mom.

Mrs. McDonald reached into her tote bag full of guidebooks and pulled out one titled
Eccentric America
.

“Hey, in Middlegate they have this thing called the Nevada Shoe Tree,” she announced. “It says here that some couple was about to get married and the groom was afraid his bride was going to run away, so he threw her shoes up into the tree. Lots of other people threw their shoes up there too, and today that tree is filled with shoes. We should go there.”

“Middlegate is a hundred miles south of here,” Dr. McDonald said. “I’m not driving that far out of our way to see a tree with shoes on it.”

“You’re no fun,” Mrs. McDonald said. “Hey, here’s something that’s only about five miles off the highway, outside of Imlay. It’s called Thunder Mountain.”

“Is it an amusement park?” Pep asked.

“No,” her mother replied, “a Creek Indian named Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder built a house out of concrete, old car bodies, and lots of other stuff he found lying around. The top floor is made out of bottles, and the windows are made from car windshields.”

“That sounds cool,” Coke remarked.

“It sounds like a waste of time to me,” Dr. McDonald said bluntly. “I thought you were all so anxious to see that ridiculous ball of twine in Kansas.”

“Yeah!” Pep said, suddenly remembering. “Let’s drive straight through to Kansas. We want to go to the ball of twine.”

She shot a look at her brother. No words were necessary. They both remembered that they had a mission to accomplish. Somebody was going to pull off an attack at the largest ball of twine in the world. Neither of them wanted to get out of the RV until they got there. Neither of them wanted to repeat what happened on Sand Mountain.

“Well, we have to stop
here
,” Dr. McDonald said to the others as he pulled off at an exit marked
Battle Mountain
. “We need to gas up. And how about we eat lunch out today?”

He pulled into the parking lot of a fast-food joint. The twins got out of the RV cautiously. They looked around for any sign of guys with bowler hats, blow guns, and golf carts; or psychotic health teachers; or other suspicious characters. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, they relaxed a bit. Dr. McDonald led the family into the restaurant. The sign said
SEAT YOURSELF
, and they slid into a booth. The waitress, an older woman, came over with menus.

“Welcome to Battle Mountain,” she said cheerfully, “the Armpit of America.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your own town,” Mrs. McDonald said with a laugh.

“Honey,” the waitress said, “it’s our claim to fame.”

It was true. She told the McDonalds that back in 2001,
The Washington Post
had named Battle Mountain, Nevada, the Armpit of America. Instead of being humiliated over it, the town had convinced the company that makes Old Spice deodorant to sponsor an annual Festival in the Pit. They had featured events such as antiperspirant tossing and an armpit beauty pageant. But those festivities had “dried out” a few years back.

“Bummer,” Coke said. “Too bad we missed that.”

“That’s what I love about America,” Mrs. McDonald said, taking notes for her website. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

The burgers were greasy but good. Then it was back onto I-80. Soon there were signs for Elko, Nevada, where the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is held each year. That’s right, cowboys and cowgirls come from all over the world to recite poetry. Mrs. McDonald suggested they stop and try to meet some cowboys there, but the sun was getting low in the sky and Dr. McDonald wanted to press on.

Small Nevada towns passed by: Osino . . . Halleck . . . Deeth . . . and even a town called Welcome. Continuing down the highway, with darkness falling, they crossed the state line.

“Woo-hoo!”
Coke yelled, clapping his hands. “Did you know that it’s illegal to hunt whales in Utah? That’s pretty strange, considering it’s landlocked.”

Mrs. McDonald smiled to herself. It was nice to know that her son shared her fascination with useless information.

“Nobody cares, Coke,” Pep told her brother. “How many miles to the largest ball of twine in the world?”

Mrs. McDonald punched it into her laptop.

“Nine hundred and eighty-seven miles!” she announced.

“Woo-hoo!”

They had to drive a few miles before they saw signs for a campground that allowed RVs. Coke asked his dad if he should do a dump before they went to sleep, but it was decided to wait a few days until the level in the holding tank was higher. They all changed into pj’s and crawled into their little beds.

Before she turned off her light, Pep took one last look at the cipher that had been in the back of her mind all day.

JNTET FFHNO LCDNB LTYUL VSEED
NTHTU EWNYI TOECO KOTEA
EORIEDPNOITOR

She was stumped. Frustrated after a few minutes, she gave up and slipped the pad under her mattress. She flipped off the little light and went to sleep.

If you ever woke up in the middle of the night with an idea or a vivid dream, you know that the human brain doesn’t just turn on and off like a light. It keeps thinking even when you’re sleeping. It is an amazing machine.

Just before dawn, Pep awoke with an idea. She got out of bed and shook Coke until he opened his eyes.

“I got it!” she whispered in his ear. “I think it might be a rail fence cipher!”

“A what?” Coke rubbed his eyes. “Are you crazy? You’ll wake Mom and Dad. Go back to sleep.”

“No, I need your help.”

Pep reached for her pad and wrote out the cipher again with no spaces between the “words,” this time dividing the letters into two rows.

Next she wrote down the first letter of the top line:
J
. Then she wrote down the first letter of the bottom line:
U
. The second letter of the top line:
N
. The second letter of the bottom line:
E
.