Mission Unstoppable (2 page)

She wrapped her arms around both twins and embraced them tightly.

Thwiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Coke looked up to see a green dart sticking out of Mya’s neck. It was inches from his face and probably was intended for him.

Mya’s legs buckled, and she crumpled, her eyes rolling back in her head. Coke and Pep caught her before she hit the ground.

“
T
 . . .
G
 . . .
F
,” Mya said, gasping for breath. “
T
 . . .
G
 . . .
F.
”

And then she went completely limp.

“I think she’s dead!” Pep shouted.

“Brilliant, Brainiac! Let’s blow this pop stand!”

“Where are we gonna go?”

“Where do you think?”

“You mean . . .”

“Yes!”

Coke took his sister’s hand and dragged her to the edge of the cliff.

“I can’t do this!” Pep yelled.

Coke turned around. The golf carts had stopped about forty yards away. The guys in black suits and bowler hats got out. Both were holding thin tubes about two feet long. They didn’t look like flute players, and they sure weren’t golfers. The one with the mustache put his tube to his mouth.

“You’re gonna have to jump!” Coke hollered to his sister.

“You can’t make me!”

“Oh yes, I can!”

With that, he pushed his sister off the cliff.

And then he jumped.

Chapter 3
Flying

“A
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Chances are you’ve never fallen off a cliff. If you had, you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now. Because you would be dead.

But have you ever jumped off a high diving board? Have you ever dropped into a steep water slide or a half pipe? Have you ever been on a really high roller coaster?

Well, forget it. Falling off a cliff is
nothing
like any of those experiences. You
still
have no idea what the McDonald twins were going through.

When you fall off a cliff, the first forty or fifty feet are a straight vertical drop. The only thing you feel in that first second or two is sheer terror. You can’t think about anything else. The good thing is—and this is probably the
only
good thing—you can’t worry about your problems. If your parents have been bugging you or some kid at school is hassling you, you don’t think about it anymore. If you had an ache or pain in any part of your body, it’s gone, instantly.

In fact, you can’t think at
all
. You can only experience. It’s all sensory. Your nervous system goes into survival mode. Nothing else matters. You may even lose control of your bladder. Luckily, in this case, that didn’t happen.

After they tumbled over the edge, the twins spun and twisted and flopped around in the air, screaming their heads off the whole time.

One thought did flash through Coke’s brain for a millisecond.

I JUST PUSHED MY SISTER OFF A CLIFF!

What had he done? But he had no choice. If he hadn’t pushed Pep and then jumped, he surely would have taken one of those poison darts in the neck, just like that lady Mya did. He had made a snap decision, and he would have to live with it.

Or die with it.

Rocks, ledges, and trees shot past Pep’s eyes as she plummeted. Something flashed through her mind, too, for a millisecond.

I WILL NEVER BE NICE TO MY BROTHER AGAIN.

This was the last straw, she thought. She would never again update Coke’s iPod for him or help him pick out clothes so he wouldn’t look nerdy. Not that it would matter, because they were both about to die.

When you’re at an amusement park, no matter how terrifying a ride is, you know you’re not going to die at the end. Somebody with an advanced engineering degree carefully designed that thrill ride to simulate weightlessness. You know that thousands of people took that same ride before you did, and they all survived. You know that a safety inspector with a clipboard is required by law to check out the rides regularly. You know that after a minute or two, the ride is going to come to an end. You’ll climb out of the little car or whatever and go enjoy some cotton candy.

But when you go flying off a cliff, there are no such assurances. At the end of a free fall, your body will most likely smash into the hard surface of the ground with thousands of pounds of pressure, crushing your flimsy bones. Your internal organs are going to explode like water balloons. Or maybe you’ll get dashed against the rocks on the side of the cliff and fracture your skull on the way down. What an unpleasant way to end a life.

But then again, it would be quick and painless.

At one second into free fall, Coke and Pep were moving about thirty miles per hour straight down. The wind was whipping, ripping past them as they accelerated, pulling at the skin on their cheeks. There was a roar in their ears, like the sound of a jet taking off in their head.

Through squinted eyes, Coke could see Pep below him, flailing her arms and legs, trying to turn herself around. At that point, they were dropping like stones.

By three seconds into free fall, they were close to sixty miles per hour and still picking up speed. Coke had once leafed through a physics book in the library and learned a few facts about falling objects. For instance, any falling body will accelerate until it reaches what is called terminal velocity: for a human, about 120 mph.

But terminal velocity varies depending on the object that’s falling. A large, flat object, like a piece of paper, will fall a lot slower than a penny. When the twins stuck out their arms and legs, their rate of descent slowed down.

Suddenly, Coke realized what he was doing. He had seen a YouTube video about something called wingsuit BASE jumping just a few weeks earlier. People jump off cliffs wearing these strange-looking wingsuits, and they can actually
fly
. It blew his mind.

Coke had been intrigued enough to do a Google search of wingsuit BASE jumping. Go ahead and look it up. People actually jump off cliffs for
fun
, and they’ve been doing it since the 1930s. According to legend, seventy-two of the first seventy-five people who tried it died. Then, in the 1990s, a French skydiver named Patrick de Gayardon developed a wingsuit that worked. Well, it worked some of the time, anyway. He died in 1998 after jumping off a cliff in Hawaii; but other skydivers took up the “sport,” and better wingsuits were designed.

Coke realized he didn’t have to die. The wingsuit could save him.

At four seconds, Coke remembered what Mya had told them:
Extend your arms and legs. You will soar like a hawk.

Not to get all scientific on you, but if you throw gravity, acceleration, air resistance, and hundreds of feet of vertical drop into an equation and then you add the fabric of a wingsuit as it rushes against the wind like the wing of an airplane, you begin to get lift. And when you’re falling off a cliff, lift is a
very
good thing to have.

When wearing a wingsuit, you can manipulate your flight by changing the angle of attack or the position of your body, or by loosening or tightening the fabric of the wingsuit. A typical skydiver will free-fall 110 to 140 miles per hour. Wearing a wingsuit, you can eventually reduce that to as little as 25 mph.

Coke extended his arms and legs as far as he could, and instantly he felt the air resistance. He was starting to move not just down, but also forward. He felt himself slowing and leveling off, like a glider. The air rushing by caught the fabric between his limbs, and the wingsuit billowed out. His body had been turned into an airfoil.

He looked down and saw that his sister had figured out the same thing.

If you had been standing on the beach on that sunny day and had looked up, you would have seen two almost-teenagers slingshotting over your head, facedown, with their arms and legs wide apart to catch the wind.

They were flying!

From the dawn of time, when the first primitive humans looked up in the sky and saw birds above them, they probably wished they could fly. How glorious it would be to soar overhead. For all our intelligence, our technology, and the progress we’ve made over the centuries, many of us would be happy to give it all up if we could only become birds.

Being human is great. Nothing beats being at the top of the food chain. Opposable thumbs are handy and all for picking things up. But if only we could
fly
!

Coke took a moment to look around. Below was the beach. To the right, in the distance, he could see his neighborhood.

The cliffs of Point Reyes are more than a thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean. It looks like a long way down when you’re standing on the beach looking up. From the other direction, as you’re dropping, it doesn’t seem that far at all.

Just as Coke and Pep were starting to relax and their heart rates were returning to something approaching normal, both twins had the same terrible thought.

How am I supposed to land?

They were moving almost sixty miles per hour. You wouldn’t jump out of car that was moving sixty miles per hour. The wingsuits had no source of power to keep the two of them in the air. Without a source of power, gravity always wins in the end.

Their eyes widened as they saw objects on the ground getting bigger. There wasn’t a lot of time.

Coke looked down. The thing
had
to have a parachute attached to it. In old war movies, skydivers always pulled a rip cord to open their chute.

The ground was coming up fast. Desperately, Coke reached behind him. His hand found some cloth, and he yanked it.

The material gave way, and Coke felt something happening behind him. He turned around to see a huge red canopy unfurling over his head. There was a big jolt when the canopy caught the air; and then as it opened all the way, it yanked at him and slowed him down even further. He saw Pep’s yellow chute open just before his did. She was about two hundred feet in front of him.

They weren’t flying anymore. They were floating.

“
Woooooooooooo-hooooooooooooo!”
Coke shouted.

Somewhere in the back of his brain he remembered hearing the expression “hit the ground running.” He knew what it meant: to get started on a project quickly. But now he realized where that expression came from. A parachutist has to hit the ground running. If parachutists don’t, they’re going to hit the ground hard, probably breaking their legs.

The twins felt themselves touch the sandy beach and ran as if they were being chased by a pack of wild dogs. It felt like they had been in the air for an eternity, but in fact it had been less than ten seconds.

Panting, breathless, Pep forgot what she’d thought about her brother after he pushed her off the cliff. She ran over and hugged him tightly. Then she got down on all fours and kissed the ground.

Chapter 4
Home Sweet Home

F
or a minute or two, the twins knelt in the sand, catching their breath, clearing their heads, and trying to comprehend what had just happened to them. Except for a few seagulls circling overhead, the beach was empty. Nobody had seen them land.

Finally, Coke looked up at the cliffs and marveled that he had jumped from such a great height and survived.

“I
told
you we should’ve taken the bus,” Pep said, panting.

“What fun would that have been?” Coke replied, cackling.

Pep unzipped her wingsuit and peeled it off. There was a Dumpster down the beach. She crumpled the suit and parachute into a big ball and stuffed them into the Dumpster. Coke did the same. The wingsuits probably cost somebody hundreds of dollars, but neither of the twins ever wanted to see those things again.

Together, Coke and Pep climbed the wooden steps leading off the beach to the main road. Looking around, they knew they were about a mile from home.

“How are we gonna tell Mom and Dad about this?” Pep asked.

“Are you crazy?” Coke replied. “We’re not gonna say a
word
to Mom or Dad. You know how they worry. They would never believe it, anyway.”

The twins hiked away from the beach, into the hills and along the narrow road until they approached Point Reyes Station. It’s a small town in the middle of a national park called Point Reyes National Seashore. Soon they could see their house. There was an RV parked in front with the words
Cruise America
painted on the side.

And there were two figures on the front lawn.

“They’re waiting for us,” Pep said, groaning.

And so they were. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald had been sitting there on lawn chairs for a while, fretting and looking up and down the street with binoculars. When they spotted the twins walking toward them, they jumped up to greet them.

“You’re late!” Dr. McDonald hollered. “Why weren’t you on the school bus?”

“We decided to walk home,” Coke said, hoping that would end the discussion.

“Both of you are a mess!” Mrs. McDonald yelled. “What were you doing: wrestling on the beach? Is that any way to treat your school clothes?”

“We were worried sick,” Dr. McDonald went on. “We thought something
terrible
might have happened!”

The twins shot glances at each other.
If they only knew.

“We’re sorry,” they said in unison.

It’s amazing how a simple, sincere apology will usually melt the hardest of hearts. At least temporarily. Dr. McDonald threw an arm around each of his children and pulled them close.

“Anything exciting happen today?” he asked.

The twins looked at each other again.

“Nah,” Coke said. “Same stuff, different day.”

“Tell us the truth,” their mother said. “Were you two in detention again?”

“No!” Coke replied indignantly. “Don’t be ridiculous! We just, uh . . . jumped off the cliff and parachuted home.”

“Aha-ha-ha!” Dr. McDonald chortled. “I love you kids!”

“Five more minutes and we were going to call the police to report you as missing, you know,” Mrs. McDonald told them. “Where are your backpacks?”

Pep had no answer for that one. They had ditched their backpacks up on the cliff when that Mya lady gave them the wingsuits to wear. Pep looked at her brother, who was a much more skillful liar than she.

“We left ’em at school,” Coke said. “We’ll get them tomorrow. There was no homework.”

“You should have called home,” Mrs. McDonald said sternly. “Why do you think we got you cell phones?”

“We . . . forgot,” Coke said.

When in doubt, “we forgot” can get you out of just about any mess you got yourself into. It may make you look like an airhead, but that’s better than admitting the
real
reason you did the dumb thing you did.

“You’d forget your heads if they weren’t screwed onto your necks,” Dr. McDonald said.

“Actually, Dad, our heads aren’t screwed on,” Coke replied. “They’re attached with tendons, ligaments, muscles, that sort of thing. If heads were screwed on, it would be a simple matter to do head transplants.”

Dr. McDonald shook
his
head: Kids!

He was the kind of man who was organized almost to the point of obsession. Everything in his office was tidy, efficient, labeled, and filed in alphabetical, chronological, or numerical order. He took pride in the fact that he could put his fingers on any piece of paper he needed within seconds. It was inconceivable to him why his children lacked this essential human trait. They must have inherited a scatterbrain gene from their mother, he assumed.

Mrs. McDonald prepared an early dinner while the twins showered and changed their clothes upstairs. Her husband’s professional life revolved around the serious study of American history, but her interests were different. Mrs. McDonald was the founder and only employee of
Amazing but True
, a web-based magazine devoted to odd facts and (some would argue) useless information.

Every day, almost a million people clicked on to the site to learn that, for instance, the total surface area of two human lungs would just about fill a tennis court. Or some other piece of trivia. Neither of the McDonald parents made a lot of money, but Mrs. McDonald’s income from
Amazing but True
was more than the salary Dr. McDonald earned teaching history at the university. Because of this, when tough family decisions needed to be made, it was usually Mrs. McDonald who called the shots.

She rang the little bell she kept in the kitchen, and the rest of the family charged down from the second floor. Spaghetti was on the table.

Any anger Mrs. McDonald had had about the children coming home late from school was gone. She heaped meatballs on everyone’s plates.

“Are you kids excited about our trip?” she asked after they had dug into the food. “We should be somewhere in the Midwest next week for your birthday, and you know we’ve got to get to Washington, D.C., by July Fourth for Aunt Judy’s wedding.”

In all the excitement, Coke and Pep had almost forgotten—in two days, after school let out for the summer, they would be leaving for a driving vacation that would take them nearly three thousand miles across the United States and then back.

“I can’t wait!” Pep gushed, with just a bit more enthusiasm than was necessary. In fact, she dreaded the trip. At home, there were new clothes that needed to be tried on, texts from her friends that needed to be replied to, videos and TV shows that needed to be watched, and web sites that needed to be surfed.

“It will be good for you kids to see Mount Rushmore, the great national parks, and the Lincoln Memorial,” said Dr. McDonald. “All those things you learn about in school but never see with your own eyes.”

“Oh, that reminds me!” Mrs. McDonald said. “You’ll never believe what I found out today. Do you know what they have in Cawker City, Kansas?”

“What?” everybody said.

“The largest ball of twine in the world!” Mrs. McDonald told the family. “Some guy spent years rolling twine in his garage to create this ball, and now it’s
gigantic
. We can go see it on our way east!”

Coke glanced over at Pep to see if she was giggling. Their mom always got excited when she heard about some new oddball place that she could put on
Amazing but True.
Pep avoided making eye contact with her brother, because she knew it would crack her up.

Dr. McDonald just rolled his eyes.

“It’s just a silly ball of twine, Bridge!” he said. (He had shortened Bridget to “Bridge” on their first date and had been calling his wife that ever since.)

“It’s not just
any
ball of twine, Ben,” Mrs. McDonald shot back. “It’s the biggest one in the world!”

“It’s
twine
!” Dr. McDonald argued, even though he knew from experience that arguing with his wife was a waste of time. “It’s not the bloody Grand Canyon. It’s not Mount Everest. It’s a ball of string!”

“I must see it with my own eyes,” she replied simply.

And that was the end of the discussion. Dr. McDonald shook his head. One of the things that attracted him to his wife in the first place was their mutual interest in history. Only later did he realize that she was interested in the history of nonsense. Weird places. Meaningless facts. Strange people. Enormous balls of twine.

Coke knew about the ball of twine in Kansas. In second grade, he had read about it in
Weekly Reader.
He remembered that it was almost nine tons!

I should probably mention here that, in fact, Coke McDonald remembered just about
everything
he had ever seen or experienced. The school psychologist tested him and told Coke he had an eidetic, or photographic, memory. In his mind, he could “see” just about any image he had ever seen with his eyes. In second grade, Coke had memorized the periodic table of elements, all the way to lawrencium. And he did it without trying.

“Okay, okay, we’ll go see the silly ball of twine, if that will make you happy,” Dr. McDonald said grumpily.

Coke had a theory to explain grown-ups, as he did for most things in life. In his view, babies are born with a specific number of brain cells, which waste away and die off as people get older. So by the time they reach thirty—and certainly by the time they reach forty—most of their brain cells are gone. This explains why grown-ups do and say the things they do.

To back up his theory, in third grade Coke did a school research project involving music. He made a list of the greatest composers in history, from Beethoven to the Beatles. Then he tracked when they wrote their best music.

Irving Berlin wrote his first hit song—“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—when he was just twenty-three years old. The Beatles made
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, their most innovative album, when John Lennon was twenty-seven and Paul McCartney was twenty-five. Beethoven started going deaf at thirty-one. Mozart was composing minuets at age five and was dead at thirty-five.

Almost as a rule, composers created their finest work in their twenties. There was a severe drop after the age of thirty. This, to Coke, was proof that the human brain deteriorates by the time people become parents. Which explains why parents are so weird. They’re essentially operating with an empty skull filled with dead brain cells.

The spaghetti hit the spot. The rest of the dinner conversation was all about the cross-country trip. They would be heading out in two days, after the last day of school.

It was Dr. McDonald’s view that all Americans should travel cross-country at least once in their lives.

“You can’t see America by flying over it,” he told the family. “You’ve got to hit the open road, breathe in the fresh air, explore the country like the pioneers did. We’ll be like a modern-day Lewis and Clark expedition.”

“Did Lewis and Clark have an RV?” asked Coke, smirking.

“Maybe we’ll be like a modern-day Donner Party,” Pep remarked.

“Very funny,” said Mrs. McDonald.

The Donner Party consisted of a group of families from Illinois who tried to get to California in 1846. They got caught in early winter snowstorms, ran out of food, and were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. Pep found the Donner Party fascinating.

“If we had to eat one of us,” she said as she held up a meatball with her fork, “which one of us would you eat?”

“I’d eat Dad,” Coke replied. “He weighs the most, so he’s got the most meat on him.”

“But it’s mostly fat,” Pep countered. “Mom would be more tender.”

“Are you calling me fat?” asked Dr. McDonald.

“That’s sick,” Mrs. McDonald said. “No Donner Party talk over dinner.”

The dishes were cleared away and the table sponged off. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald went upstairs to begin packing for the trip, leaving the twins to load the dishwasher.

“Remember that lady in the red suit we met at the top of the cliff?” Pep asked her brother.

“Yeah,” Coke recalled. “Her name was Mya,”

“Do you think she’s . . . dead?”