Brainboy and the Deathmaster (20 page)

When they came gasping out of the elevator with
the last three, a sleepy-looking Snoodles shuffled out of his room in slippers and a nightshirt and a striped nightcap.

“Better change, Snoodles,” Darryl advised. “It might be a chilly night.”

“Y-yes, y-young sir,” Snoodles said, shuffling obediently back into his room.

“Hedderly, could you go back up to S and get us some provisions?” Nina said. “Water and fruit and nuts and stuff?”

“Provisions for what?” Ruthie asked as Hedderly trooped off.

“For if we get out of this place,” Darryl said, opening the door to Chem. “Abs, could you bring one of the pods in here?”

Abs hefted a pod and followed Darryl to the rear of Chem.

“In there,” Darryl said, pointing at the mixing tank.

Abs set the pod in the tank. Soon Hedderly returned with a bulging sack of provisions, which Darryl had Abs cram into the pod.

“Snoodles?” Darryl called out.

The whole team had crowded anxiously into Chem to watch, but they made an aisle so that Snoodles, now in his regular lab coat and pants, could shuffle up to the tank.

“Water, please,” Darryl said.

Snoodles attached a hose to the nozzle of a gray tank marked “H2O” and started filling the mixing vat. When the tank was half full, Darryl gave a signal and Snoodles switched off the valve. Darryl sealed the pod, which was floating like an egg-shaped canoe in a cistern, and hit the button on the tank’s outer wall. As when Snoodles mixed up G-17, the vat’s bottom dropped out. The pod vanished.

“Ew!” cried Greg, as eye-stinging disinfectant swirled around the tub.

“Where did it go?” cried Ruthie, as the bottom of the tank flipped back into place.

“Who knows?” Darryl said. “But it’s bound to come out somewhere. We figured the water would make the trip smoother. Abs, could you please bring in another one?”

Abs lugged in a second pod and set it in the tank.

“All set, Nina?” Darryl said.

They’d decided last night that she should be first to go—the human guinea pig. She climbed onto the edge of the tank, and as Snoodles filled it up, Darryl helped her into the pod. After fastening her seat belt, she looked up at him, her innocent blue eyes big behind the lenses of her glasses, and his throat suddenly constricted, so that his “Good luck” came out as barely a whisper.

“You, too,” she whispered back.

He took a deep breath, sealed the lid, and flipped the flush switch.
Whoosh!
Just like that, Nina was gone. Though it felt as if she’d taken half his insides with her, he cleared his throat and said:

“Ready, Ruthie?”

“No way!”

“You want to stick around here and die?”

By the time Abs set another pod into the tank, Ruthie was ready to climb in. Again Snoodles filled the tank halfway. Darryl sealed the pod and hit the flush switch.

One after the other he flushed them down the tank: Paul, Billy, Mario. After Suki he had to rinse his eyes, they smarted so much from the disinfectant fumes.

“Ready, Greg?”

Greg cowered back into the shadows.

“Then you’re next, Snoodles.”

As Abs picked up the elderly man and slipped him into the waiting pod, Darryl assumed the filling duties. After Snoodles came Hedderly, who took up even more of the pod than Paul had, though he didn’t seem to mind the cramped space a bit. The last thing Darryl saw of him was a huge grin, as if he was going on one of the rides in the Seattle Center.

“It’s now or never,” Darryl said, turning to Greg.
“Abs has to go second to last, and I have to go last.”

“Why do you get to go last?” Greg whined.

“There’ll be nobody to seal the last person in. So I’m going to try to hold the lid closed with my hand. Unless you want to do that.”

Greg stepped up shakily and climbed into the third-to-last pod as Darryl started refilling the tank. When Darryl secured the lid, Greg started pounding the hard plastic, his eyes nearly popping out of his head in panic. Darryl knew all too well how that felt, but it didn’t keep him from flipping the flush switch.

“Bring both the last two, will you, Abs?”

Abs lugged in a pod and placed it in the vat. When he fetched the last one, Darryl had him set it upside down on the tank’s edge.

“We couldn’t have done it without you,” Darryl said, shaking one of Abs’s powerful hands.

Abs could barely squeeze himself into the pod in the vat, but once in, he sat docilely scrunched up, watching like a faithful dog as Darryl filled the tank. Darryl sealed the lid and hit the flush button.

For the last hour Darryl had been forcing himself to act bravely and decisively to inspire the others with confidence. But the instant Abs vanished, the instant there was no one left to put on an act for, he started trembling like the night he’d climbed into the tree hut.
The truth was, the prospect of falling into a mysterious pipe in a transparent pod terrified him.

Still, he didn’t have much choice. He put his trembling hands onto the last pod and pushed. It tumbled into the vat, landing right side up. He half filled the tank, turned off the water valve, and climbed into the wobbly canoe. His arm wasn’t quite long enough to reach the flush button on the outside of the tank.

“Here, let me. After all, I owe you a double debt now.”

Out of the shadows stepped the new, younger Mr. Masterly. With one hand he hit the flush switch; with the other he grabbed Darryl by the scruff of the neck. The pod was sucked down—but not Darryl. For a moment he simply dangled over the abyss, his eyes stinging painfully. Then Mr. Masterly yanked him over the edge of the tank and set him on his feet beside him.

“Interesting. I feel as strong as when I was twenty-five. The middle-aged me might have dropped you—and then where would we be?”

Darryl couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe.

“I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you,” Mr. Masterly said, patting him on the shoulder. “First you come up with the formula. And now you spare me all this trouble. Not to mention the guilt.”

Darryl could only blink in bewilderment.

“What do I mean? Simply that you did the disposal job for me.”

“You mean …’’ Darryl swallowed hard. “You mean the pods won’t come out somewhere?”

“They’ll come out all right. But the lab’s deep in the wilderness. The pods are unbreakable and airtight and can’t be opened from inside. When their oxygen runs out, they’ll all suffocate.’’ He smiled ruefully. “I’d gotten attached to you all, so I really wasn’t sure I’d be able to go through with it. Now I won’t have to.”

W
hat with the free ride home from Hurt’s Point in the limo, Friday’s expenses hadn’t been nearly as steep as BJ had feared, so that night he splurged and took his mother to dinner at her favorite Italian restaurant, Basta Pasta, up in Montlake. At his insistence the waiter brought her a glass of Chianti with her spaghetti, and Mrs. Walker, who rarely drank, got a little giddy. She hooted when BJ sprang his idea on her.

“Hiking! What in the Sam Hill put that idea in your head, sugar pie?”

“School starts next week, Ma. I haven’t been any-where all summer. Hiking’s cheap. Boris wants to try it, too.”

“Don’t you need equipment? Tents and such?”

“That’s the best part. Dare’s folks had all that stuff. He wouldn’t mind me borrowing it.”

“You mean going over to their house? I’m sure it’s all locked up. I imagine the bank will be auctioning off the contents and putting the house on the market.”

“That’s the thing, Ma. I was walking by there the other day and these people were clearing out the garage,
and I said how I was Dare’s friend and they let me take some of the hiking gear.”

“You’re not serious.”

In fact, he was stretching the truth considerably, but he nodded and said, “It’s all down in the basement.”

“Good heavens. Where would you want to hike? Discovery Park?”

“Not in the city! We want to go to the mountains.”

“But how would you get there?”

“Don’t you get it? We want you to come, too. You’d drive us.”

She hooted again. “Me! Hiking?”

“Think how great it would be. We could drive up to a nice campsite tomorrow and set up a tent—like a home base. We could cook out, and you could bring some books and stuff. Then maybe Boris and I could hike up a trail and spend a night on our own, just so we could get a taste of the wilderness.”

“By yourselves?”

“You could come, too, if you want. That’d be great. I just wasn’t sure you’d be into hiking ten or fifteen miles uphill.”

“You’re talking about this weekend?”

“Sure. The weather’s supposed to be great—and
Monday’s a holiday. And like I said, next week school starts.”

“High time,” she murmured.

“Don’t you think it would be cool, sleeping in a tent?”

“Why people want to sleep on the ground when they have perfectly comfortable beds at home is beyond me.”

“Aw, come on, you’ve got to open your mind to new things. Knowledge is the ship to the Hesperides, right? There’s other kinds of knowledge than what you get out of books.”

“I don’t think I need to sleep on the ground to know I wouldn’t like it.”

“Well, maybe we could borrow the Bottses’ RV. Then you could sleep in a bed.”

“But why on earth do you want to go way up in the mountains, sugar pie?”

“Think of the Sunday book. Those Greek gods lived up on a mountain. And Moses went up a mountain to get those commandments. And the Dalai Lama lived way up in the mountains. And Noah’s ark landed on a mountain. And the Japanese worshiped Mount Fuji. And the Incas had their holy city way up in—”

“Okay, okay. I suppose I haven’t given you a vacation this summer. I suppose Clara would come over and feed the babies.”

When they got home, the “babies” were all
crouched around the perimeter of the kitchen, eyes fixed coldly on Boris, who was sitting at the table gnawing the last of a leftover leg of lamb off the bone. Boris set it down and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Beege said I could have it.”

“That’s fine,” Mrs. Walker said. “But I thought you were going back to the shelter.”

Such was the story BJ had come up with.

“They’re full up,” Boris said. “So I came back here. Hope it’s okay.”

“It’s perfect,” BJ said. “That way we can get an early start in the morning.”

“But I thought we locked up the house before we left,” Mrs. Walker said.

Boris looked to BJ, who put on a sheepish face and said:

“I might have left the back door unlocked. Sorry, Ma.”

Mrs. Walker went into the hallway and opened the door to the basement.

“Lands,” she said. “You
did
get a mess of hiking gear.”

BJ slipped Boris a low five.

“Piece of cake,” Boris said under his breath.

Later on, when the boys were alone in the basement,
BJ found out that amassing the heap of knapsacks and coiled ropes and furled tents and rolled-up sleeping bags had required two trips to First Hill.

“But it was no sweat,” Boris said. “A baby could’ve broken into that place. Ever seen that REI store by the freeway?”

“Sure,” said BJ, whose winter boots were from Recreational Equipment Inc.

“Their basement looked like that.”

“What are these for?” BJ asked, picking up a bundle of aluminum stakes wrapped in twine.

“You got me.”

“Ever put up a tent?”

“You kidding?”

“Me neither.’’ From under a canteen BJ pulled a bunch of geological survey maps and a book:
The Joys of Mountaineering.
“Smart you grabbed this.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the big reader.”

And indeed long after Boris was snoring away in the bottom bunk, BJ was still reading about rappelling and belaying and top roping.

“I
’m wiped,” Boris declared, dumping his backpack on the ground.

He sat down on it and lit up. But even though they’d been hiking the whole day with thirty pounds on their backs, and even though the last couple of miles, up a winding, wooded notch, had been the steepest part of all, BJ remained on his feet, staring out across the clearing before them. It was stippled with reds and yellows and blues: wildflowers that seemed to be lit from within, thanks to the slanting, late-afternoon sunlight. But it wasn’t the candlelike flowers that grabbed his attention, it was the rock face rising up beyond them. It went straight up about a hundred feet, sheer as a ten-story building.

“What?” Boris said, blowing dragonlike streams of smoke out his nostrils. “That cliff thing?”

“You think it’s a cliff?”

“What else?”

“It’s too … too square. Like a building.”

“But it’s all rocky.”

BJ dumped his pack and tromped through the
wildflowers. Except for its squareness, the rock face fit in well enough with the sort of wilderness they’d been slogging through all day. There was a cave a little way up the cliff with water trickling out into a little stream, which he was able to jump across easily enough. Higher up the face were a couple of rocky ledges with twisted pines growing out of them. Still, there was something eerily unnatural about the thing as a whole.

As he started to reconnoiter around the base, Boris fell in at his side.

“Think it might be the lab place?”

“I don’t know.”

When they got halfway around the buildinglike mountain, Boris called out: “Neen?”

The only reply was a faint echo off the rock.

“Darryl!” BJ cried.

They called the names over and over but got only echoes in response.

“I don’t see no doors or windows,” Boris said. “Or any of those heliport things.”

“Maybe he lands on top,” BJ said.

By the time they’d circled the monolith, the sunlight had deserted the clearing, dulling the wildflowers. The two boys refilled their canteens in the little stream and, weary to the bone, plunked down on the ground by their packs.

“What do you think?” BJ said.

“You’re the big thinker,” Boris replied, hugging himself.

“You cold?”

“Uh-uh. It’s just freakin’ creepy up here.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s just a bunch of rocks and trees.”