Brainboy and the Deathmaster (21 page)

“You like Skid Row better?”

“At least there’s people there. There’s nobody here but us.”

“Not if that lab thing’s in there.”

Boris lit up another cigarette. “You want to know what I think?” he said, blowing smoke in BJ’s face.

“What?”

“Masterly was probably flying to Spokane or something and found that GPS thing under the seat and tossed it.”

“I don’t know,” BJ said, watching the last sunlight desert the pinnacle. “I think we should climb it.”

“In the friggin’ dark?”

“In the morning.”

“You’ll never get your fat butt up there.”

“We’ll have to stick in pro and secure ropes.”

“What?”

“Stuff from in here,” BJ said, pulling
The Joys of Mountaineering
out of his pack.

Boris reached into his own pack and pulled out a package of hot dogs.

“We got to pitch the tent before we eat,” BJ said.

“No way.”

“You need light for pitching a tent. At least if you’ve never done it before.”

Last night they’d slept in beds in the Bottses’ RV. They’d borrowed it yesterday morning, picked up supplies at the QFC, and headed east across the floating bridge. Mrs. Walker had assumed they wanted to go somewhere like Mount Rainier National Park, but BJ had insisted on
real
wilderness, and they’d ended up at an obscure campsite off Route 20 in the Northern Cascades Wilderness Area—about ten or twelve miles south of the X on his map. This morning Mrs. Walker had changed her mind about letting the boys go off for a night on their own, but BJ had begged so pitifully and relentlessly, crossing his heart that they’d be back by two sharp the next day, that he’d finally worn her down. In spite of perfect weather the wilderness experience hadn’t lived up to his expectations. Not only were their packs heavy, they’d had to stop over and over to compare the readings on the Kirbys’ electronic compass with the geological survey map onto which he’d transferred the X from the road map. Every time he decided they should go right, Boris wanted to go left—except
when they’d finally crossed a meadow and found the notch that had led them up here. This had been posted with “Keep Out!” and “No Trespassing!” and “Private Property” signs, and for Boris the idea of going where you weren’t supposed to had been irresistible.

The Joys of Mountaineering
advised digging a moat around your tent in case of rain, but it took them the rest of the daylight just to set the thing up, and since the sky was clear, they skipped the moat in favor of building a fire and roasting hot dogs. After taking a swig from his canteen, Boris spat the water on the ground.

“I knew those beer commercials were full of it,” he said. “Always saying how these mountain streams are so friggin’ fresh.”

BJ sampled the water and spat it out, too. It had a chemical taste.

“See?” Boris said. “And no mustard. I can’t believe you forgot the mustard.”

“I was trying to cut out as much weight as possible.”

“Hot dogs with no mustard. It’s like them low-tar cigarettes.”

After dinner they put the fire out, and while Boris smoked, BJ brushed his teeth by the funny-tasting stream. He’d originally cut out the weight of his tooth-brush and toothpaste, too, but his mother had shoved
them into one of his pack’s side pouches and made him promise to use them.

The tent barely had room for their packs and their two sleeping bags. They unrolled the bags so that the head of one was at the foot of the other. The temperature had dropped quite a bit since sunset, so they wormed into their bags with their clothes on.

“When was the last time you took a bath?” BJ asked.

“I don’t take baths. But look who’s talking about smelling.”

They each had a flashlight, and while Boris read the steamy paperback he’d stolen from Ms. Grimsley’s handbag, BJ pored over
The Joys of Mountaineering.

“I think we can do it,” he declared after a while.

“Do what?”

“Climb that cliff. It doesn’t really matter if it’s ten feet or a hundred feet. It’s the same idea. What you do is you stick these whatjamajiggies in the cracks and—”

At a splashing sound from the nearby stream BJ instantly flicked off his flashlight.

“What the …?” Boris said as BJ flicked his off, too.

“Shh. Might be a bear.”

There was a series of splashes.

“Do bears go around in herds?” Boris whispered.

“They’re good at sniffing out food, that much I know. Did you wrap up the extra hot dogs?”

Boris dug in his pack. “Yeah, they’re wrapped up,” he whispered. “Can they smell
us
?”

How could they not, BJ thought. He heard a click, horribly close. “What was that?” he whispered.

“I ain’t going to be dinner for no bears.”

The flap let a paper-thin shaft of moonlight into the tent, enough for BJ to make out the glint of a blade. “You went in my drawer?” he hissed, recognizing the switchblade.

“Your drawer, my knife.”

“Sneak. I ought to—”

“You ought to be glad I brought it.”

“A lot of good it’s going to do against a bunch of bears.”

But the splashes had subsided, and after about half an hour their fatigue conquered their fear and they fell fast asleep.

“Y
ou really should thank me, Darryl.”

Mr. Masterly was leaning on the computer console in the octagon, but Darryl, though only a few feet away, barely heard him. His ears were still ringing with echoes of what Mr. Masterly had said in Chem:
The pods are unbreakable and airtight. … When their oxygen runs out, they’ll all suffocate.
Thanks to him, Nina and the others would plop out into some no-man’s-land and watch each other die.

“How were you planning to close the lid of your pod?”

Darryl just stared dolefully at the white marble floor. First he’d wished his family dead, and they’d died. Now he’d killed off Nina and all his other lab mates.

“If you thought you were going to hold the lid down from the inside, it never would have worked. There’s toxic chemicals in the flush, and it would have been a very bumpy ride. You’d have been contaminated. So you see we’re indebted to each other.”

What he needed, Darryl realized, was Mr. Masterly’s special elevator key. With that he might be able to get up to the roof and the helicopter. Maybe he
could figure out how to fly it down to the pods before the oxygen supplies ran out.

“Tell me, what did you think of my plan?” Mr. Masterly said.

Darryl stared at the man’s pants pocket, wishing he could will the key out of it into his hand.

“I found it missing when I was packing up a few things I didn’t want to leave behind. Lucky for you—otherwise I wouldn’t have come down till morning. Where is it, by the way? It has sentimental value to me.”

When Darryl didn’t answer, Mr. Masterly glanced around the gleaming octagon.

“Kind of a shame, isn’t it, getting rid of all this? But it wouldn’t do to have some granola-eating hiker stumble across it. And I must say it’s served its purpose beyond my wildest expectations.”

Darryl cowered as the new, younger Mr. Masterly approached him.

“I’m not going to bite you, Darryl. I just want to shake your hand.”

Darryl didn’t offer his hand, but Mr. Masterly took it anyway, giving it a good squeeze.

“By all rights your name should end up in the history books.
Darryl Kirby: The Boy Who Conquered Time.
” Mr. Masterly sighed. “I doubt it will. Chances are, I’ll get the credit. Though you never know. If I
decide to keep our little discovery to myself,
nobody
will get the credit. Which would be selfish and selfless at the same time, I suppose. … In any event, I want to thank you. And say I’m genuinely sorry you decided against being my son.”

It was such a relief when Mr. Masterly finally let go of his hand and went back into Chem that Darryl just stood there taking deep breaths, not even thinking of fleeing. Soon Mr. Masterly came back out with some papers under his arm and a big brown jar in his hand.

“Lifetime supply of the new G-17,” he said. “Though perhaps not for my particular lifetime. Lucky I know how to make more.”

He walked across the octagon and got into the waiting elevator.

“Good-bye, Darryl,” he said.

“But …”

“Yes?”

“But what about …?”

“What about you? I really am sorry. But you do have the run of the place.”

Run of the place? But how long would it be a place? As the elevator door closed, Darryl’s eyes shot to the panel over the door. The elevator stopped at S. Would he be looking to recover his MasterPlan? It was in Nina’s room.

Darryl bolted into Chem and grabbed a jar of hydrochloric acid off one of the shelves. As he carried it up the emergency stairs, he unscrewed the lid so he would be ready to throw the contents into Mr. Masterly’s eyes. But when he stepped into the corridor on S, the elevator door was once again closing on Mr. Masterly’s youthful face.

Up above, the S panel went dark, and the E panel lit up. But only briefly. The elevator proceeded straight to the top floor.

Darryl set the jar of acid down carefully on the floor and hustled to the elevator. Pushing the button did nothing: the elevator remained at the top floor. Darryl dashed into the kitchen and got the big metal spoon Hedderly used for stirring soup and tried to use it as a crowbar. He’d once seen a movie where the hero gets to the top of a building by shinnying up elevator cables. But Paradise Lab was far too solidly constructed. The elevator door wouldn’t budge.

Darryl clattered back down to L, darted into the back of Chem, and hit the flush button on the mixing vat. The cleanser shot out the nozzles and swirled around the shiny sides as the bottom flipped open. But he just watched, paralyzed by the knowledge that he would never come out alive. How could a corpse open the pods?

The elevator still wouldn’t leave the top floor, so he took the stairs back to S, where he ducked into his room and changed into a black jumpsuit and his cross-training shoes. From there he headed straight for the pantry and climbed into the dumbwaiter. It didn’t move. He pressed the button outside the door. Nothing happened. It must have been for bringing the dumb-waiter back down when it was up at Mr. Masterly’s private quarters, or else for making the little amber light up there start blinking.

The sight of the vent across the dim pantry made him feel faint, so he went into the kitchen and ate a hunk of leftover meat loaf. Back in the pantry he pulled the vent cover off and squeezed into the shaft on his back. At the end of the long tube there was no moon, no stars, only a circle of charcoal gray that looked about the size of a nickel. He shut his eyes tight, trying to get a grip on his dread—and Nina’s face appeared, her eyes big and terrified behind the lenses of her glasses, her lips mouthing the words “Help me!”

Then Nina turned into his brother. “
Why do you have to be such a wuss, Dare?
” Jason said, shaking his head in disgust.

B
J had no idea how long he’d been asleep when a new noise woke him. Not a splashing this time but a loud tapping from somewhere very near the tent.

“What the heck is that?”

Boris groaned, rolling over in his bag. More tapping ensued, till there was a whole symphony of it.

“What the freak is it?” Boris said, sitting up.

“Woodpeckers?”

“Bears and woodpeckers hang out together?”

BJ leaned forward and gingerly pulled back the tent flap. Between them and the monolith a trail of what looked like enormous eggs glimmered in the moonlight.

“What the heck?” Boris said.

As they gaped out, one of the eggs started rolling toward them. It came to rest against a rock no more than ten feet from the tent.

“Is that one of them dinosaur eggs?” Boris said.

“Isn’t that a kid inside?” BJ said.

“Jeez. Maybe it’s one of those MBO things.”

“You mean embryo? It’s awful big for an embryo.”

“Maybe it’s from Mars or something. Maybe that
square mountain’s a UFO.”

As the tapping started up again, BJ grabbed a flashlight and shone the beam on the nearby egg.

“I don’t think embryos have shoes,” BJ said. That’s what the boy in the egg was using to tap with.

“How do you know what they got on Mars?”

“He looks like a regular kid. Maybe he’s one of those bubble boys who’s allergic to everything.”

“Looks more like blubber boy to me.”

The boy in the egg
was
pudgy.

“Looks like he’s trying to get out,” BJ said. “Maybe we should—”

“No way! That’s how it always starts. You let one out, then they take over the whole friggin’ world.”

But the bubble boy looked so unthreatening—kind of pathetic, really, shoehorned into the egg, gasping for breath—that BJ squirmed out of his sleeping bag and crawled out of the tent with his boots and flashlight. At the sight of him the bubble boy gestured violently toward the top of his egg. There was a lever on the outside.

BJ pulled on his boots and walked hesitantly toward the other eggs. They were beached in the shallow stream. One was empty, the lid open, but the others were all closed. One contained a big sack; the others, people: three grown-up men, three girls, and three boys. The girls and boys were all gasping and gesturing desperately to be
freed. The adults were gaping out, dazed.

BJ turned his flashlight back on the fat boy in the egg nearer the tent. His face was turning greenish. It really looked as if he was suffocating. But as BJ walked back that way, Boris popped out of the tent, switchblade in hand.

“No way, José.”

BJ sighed. “We’ve been through this before, Boris.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t fallin’ for no stupid tricks this time.”

“Fine. Kill ‘em if you want.”

“Huh?”

“Look at him. He’s suffocating in there. They are, too.’’ BJ turned and swept his flashlight across the other eggs. He settled on one. “You know, she looks kind of like you. Just a lot prettier.”

“You think I’m falling for that?” Boris said contemptuously.

BJ shrugged but kept the beam of his flashlight on the girl, who was knocking on the inside of her egg with her shoe. “Maybe it’s
not
your sister. In that picture you showed us, she didn’t wear glasses.”