Brainboy and the Deathmaster (23 page)

This time, to Darryl’s astonishment, it came right for him. In fact, he had to pull his head back to keep from being skewered. The spear reached its apex about twenty feet over his head, then clattered down onto the roof. It lay there for a moment, then rolled off the edge. Darryl poked his head back out in time to see it shatter against a rock down below.

“You’ve got to grab it, Dare!” BJ cried.

They ran to find a new branch and whittle another spear for Abs to throw. Again he managed to heave it
onto the roof of the lab on his first try, and this time Darryl pounced on it. Tied through the hole was a piece of nylon thread: unraveled tent.

“Pull it up!” BJ cried.

Darryl pulled on the thread. It grew heavier and heavier, and eventually, instead of thread, he had rope.

With the helicopter gone, the only place to secure the rope was the “parking meter.’’ He dashed over to it and knotted the end around it as the readout wound down: 4:33, 4:32, 4:31 …

When he poked his head back out over the ledge, everyone down below started waving and hollering.

“Come on, Dare!” cried BJ.

“Hurry up, Darryl!” cried Nina.

But as he peered down the length of rope, slithering like a hundred-foot python in the breeze, he knew it was useless. It was too far, and he’d used up all his strength on the chimney climb.

“Get out of here! There’s only four minutes!”

But his words came out as feeble croaks.

He wormed back away from the edge and struggled to his feet. With his back to the precipice, he took the rope in his sweaty palms, his heart feeling like a bird about to burst out of its cage. He closed his eyes—and saw Nina, who would be buried in the rubble when the lab blew.

Then Nina’s face became his father’s.

“Come on, Dare,” he whispered. “You’re the only Kirby left.”

Opening his eyes a slit, Darryl started backing toward the edge, feeding the rope out through his oily hands.

B
J’s hands were sweaty, too, as he steadied the end of the rope, as
The Joys of Mountaineering
instructed. Feeling the rope jerk, he looked up and saw a small, moonlit figure starting down the ten-story cliff.

“He don’t look so hot,” Boris said.

“How could he after that chimney climb?” said Nina.

“After what?” Boris said.

“What if the whole place blows?” said the Hispanic-looking boy.

“Guess you better make a run for it, Mario,” Nina said.

Mario looked over his shoulder, then back up at Darryl. He stayed put.

Except for the one kid who’d already skedaddled, they all stayed put: three adults with scars on their fore-heads and eight kids standing there with their necks craned. They all gasped when Darryl lost his grip on the rope. But after a short fall he caught on the branch of a twisted pine growing out of the side of the cliff.

“Careful!” Nina screamed.

“You can do it!” BJ yelled, wishing he could take Darryl’s place up there.

“Just don’t look down!” Nina advised.

As Darryl continued his jerky descent, the rope slipped in his hands again. This time his foot caught on a little ledge.

“Jeez,” Boris said. “He’s not going to make it.”

“Come on,” BJ said, handing the rope off to Nina.

To get a hundred feet of nylon thread they’d had to unravel only a small part of the tent. BJ told everyone to grab hold of the rest of it.

“You know, like when somebody’s jumping off a building in a cartoon.”

The group formed a circle with the tent stretched out in the middle like a trampoline. The skinny boy who’d taken off shouldered in beside BJ to take his place holding the net.

“Greg!” Nina said. “You came back.”

“Well, he got us out,” Greg said in a quavery voice.

Darryl must not have taken Nina’s advice about not looking down. He must have seen what they were up to, for as soon as the net was tight as a drum, he pushed off the cliff and released the rope. Greg’s squeal was still echoing in the night air when Darryl landed on his back—“Oooomph!”—in the middle of the tent.

He looked dazed, but as they lowered him to the
ground, his eyes were open.

“Are you okay, Dare?” BJ cried, kneeling beside him.

Darryl blinked and said something, but too faintly to hear. BJ put his ear up to Darryl’s mouth. As soon as he made out the croaked message, he passed it on:

“We’ve got to get out of here!”

“Come on, everybody, let’s go!” Nina cried. “Abs, grab Darryl!”

Abs tossed Darryl over his shoulder like a gunny-sack, and off they all went, abandoning the tent, rope, sack of provisions, knapsacks, and plastic eggs. Fortunately, BJ didn’t leave his flashlight. The notch bristled with fir trees that totally blocked out the moonlight. As they were clambering down the twisty trail, someone screeched, and BJ turned and shone his light on the Asian girl, who’d tripped on a root and was holding her ankle. The big man in kitchen whites picked her up and carried her over
his
shoulder, chortling as her long hair tickled his face.

BJ had led them only a couple of hundred yards down the trail when someone kicked him in the small of his back with a heavy boot. At least that was how it felt as he dropped to his knees. A split second after the concussion came a deafening explosion, and the flashlight flew out of his hand. The sudden darkness rang with the splintering
thunks.
Groping, he located the
flashlight under a fern and shone it around frantically. The first thing he stopped on was a grinning Abs, standing upright behind him on the trail, Darryl still over his shoulder. Behind him, the tall girl was sprawled on the ground, spluttering as she spat dirt off her lips.

“Is anyone hurt?” came Nina’s voice from farther back.

“My shoulder!” whined one boy.

“My knee!” whined another.

“My elbow!”

It turned out that almost everyone had a bruise or a bump or an abrasion, but the soldierly firs had shielded them from the debris of the explosion. Not one of them was seriously injured. Still, they were all too shaken and weary to go much farther in the dark, so BJ and Boris led the way down to the meadow they’d passed on the hike up. It was a brisk night, but dry, and they all curled up together like a litter of puppies under the starry sky.

“I
t’s an important experiment, Darryl,” said Mr. Masterly, standing beside him in Chem. “It may hurt a little, but afterward you can take some G-17, and your skin will be young again. Go ahead, try it.”

As Darryl stuck his right hand over the flame of the Bunsen burner, he yelped—and his eyes popped open. He wasn’t in Chem at all. He was lying in tall grass under a dove-gray sky. The none-too-soft pillow under his head was one of Abs’s calves. Nina was curled up in a ball beside him, her glasses lying in the grass, one of the lenses broken.

Darryl sat up without waking either her or Abs. The meadow glistened in the soft dawn light—or at least the dew in the tall grass glistened. It was pretty chilly, but his right hand felt scalding hot. That’s what had awakened him. His palm was bright red. Rope burn.

His ankles were still sore from the chimney climb, but he got to his feet and hobbled around the circle of sleepers, taking a head count. Everyone present and accounted for—except Mr. Masterly, who’d flown away in the helicopter.

“Hey, everybody, wake up!”

A dozen heads lifted from the ground. He’d gotten his voice back.

“He might fly back to make sure we’re dead.”

“Huh?” said Boris, rubbing his eyes. “Who?”

“You could be right,” said Ruthie, who didn’t need to be told who “he” was. “We shouldn’t be out in the open like this.”

“He must have heard the explosion from the helicopter,” said Billy.

“Yeah, but he’s a careful man,” said Nina, putting on her half-broken glasses. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Anybody have anything to eat?” Boris asked.

“Yeah, I’m starved,” said Paul.

Hedderly pulled something out of a pocket: a packet of yeast for bread making.

“I got hot dogs in my pack,” Boris said. “I’m going back.”

“Are you nuts?” BJ said. “It’ll be buried under a ton of rocks. Let’s go. Ma’s waiting at base camp.”

“You go ahead,” Boris said stubbornly. “I’ll catch up.”

Nina tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use, so she went back up the trail with him while the rest of them headed down. Thanks to Darryl’s ankles and Paul’s knee and Snoodles’s age, the larger party didn’t
move very quickly, and after about four miles Nina and Boris rejoined them in a clearing by a river.

“I hate to admit it, Beege,” Boris said, “but you were right.”

“It’s just a big pile of rubble,” said Nina. “Paradise Lab’s Paradise Lost.”

“Good riddance,” said Suki.

“G-g-good riddance,” echoed Snoodles.

As if to underscore this sentiment, the morning sun peeked out over the shoulder of a peak off to their left.

Thanks to their early start it was still morning when they reached the campsite. As BJ led them toward the parking lot, where two campers and a big beige-and-green RV were parked, Darryl stared at a young couple frying eggs outside a tent. They reminded him so much of a photo of his parents on their honeymoon hike that he had to fight an urge to cry. The young couple stared right back—for Darryl and the rest of them made a pretty odd procession. Except for BJ and Boris, all the kids were in space-age jumpsuits, while the three adults had crescent-shaped scars on their foreheads.

When they reached the RV, BJ went in alone. Darryl heard Mrs. Walker’s “Sugar pie!” through the screen door. In a minute BJ hopped back out. His mother followed but stopped in the doorway.

“What in the name of Pete?” she said, agog.

“Hey, Mrs. Walker,” Boris said, sniffing the air. “Is that bacon? I could eat a friggin’ horse.”

Mrs. Walker stood there in her purple UW sweat suit, blinking in the sunlight. “Who in the world are … honey child!”

“Hi, Mrs. Walker,” Darryl said, stepping out of the crowd.

She came down the two steps and folded him in her arms. “Is it really you?”

“It’s me,” he said.

She smelled wonderful—coffee and bacon—and suddenly he couldn’t hold his tears back. But she held him long enough that he managed to wipe them away on her sweatshirt. Then she took him by the shoulders and peered into his face.

“Where in Sam Hill did you come from, child?”

“Up there,” he said, cocking his head to the north. “We all came from the lab.”

“The lab? What lab?”

“We’re starved, Ma,” BJ said. “How about we drive down to that pancake house we passed? We’ll explain everything.”

“Yeah!” Boris cried.

“But who are all these people?” Mrs. Walker said.

“This here’s my sister, Nina,” Boris said, pulling Nina forward.

“You broke your glasses, sweetie,” Mrs. Walker said.

“It’s okay,” Nina said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Where’d you get the RV?” Darryl asked.

“It’s the Bottses’,” Mrs. Walker said.

“If you don’t mind,” said Darryl, “could we all get in? We don’t want to be seen.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Pile in!” BJ said. “Ma, I’ll sit up front and explain.”

But the front seat wasn’t divided from the rest of the RV, and as Mrs. Walker guided the lumbering vehicle back down windy Route 20, everybody joined in telling her about Paradise Lab and the great escape—everybody except Abs, who sat doing stretching exercises in a corner, and Boris, who raided the little fridge. However, it wasn’t easy to convince Mrs. Walker of the existence of a luxurious, multileveled laboratory embedded inside a mountain.

“I’m sorry to doubt you all,” she said. “But how on earth could you build something like that way up here in the wilderness?”

“Using people like Abs and Hedderly,” Nina said. “A whole construction crew handpicked from the mental institutions Mr. Masterly backs with all his donations. It’s all in his MasterPlan. Isn’t that right, Hedderly? Didn’t you help build the lab?”

“That’s right, kiddo,” Hedderly said.

“That’s r-r-right,” said Snoodles. “I just w-w-wish I could r-r-remember it. I’m s-s-so s-s-stupid!”

“No, you’re not,” said Ruthie.

Mrs. Walker braked, and they fell in behind a slow-moving logging truck. “But what happened to the rest of this construction crew?” she asked.

“I don’t like to think about that,” Darryl said.

“It must have taken them ten years to build,” Ruthie said, “because he started almost thirteen years ago. Mario and I were the first kids there, and I don’t think it’s been three years.”

“And he just blew it all to bits?” said Mrs. Walker.

“It was like an atom bomb!” Greg said.

Boris didn’t contribute to the general conversation till he heard that they were passing up the pancake parlor.

“But I was psyched for a plate of those silver dollar guys!” he cried.

“We can’t all troop into a public place,” Ruthie said. “Mr. Masterly might have spies.”

“I want pancakes!”

“Hedderly makes buttermilk pancakes every Thursday morning,” Greg pointed out. “Can you make them on a Monday, Hedderly?”

Hedderly nodded, grinning, and Mrs. Walker made a pit stop for the ingredients at a small grocery store in
the town of Newhalem. Soon they were back on the road with Hedderly whipping up skillet after skillet of silver-dollar pancakes on the RV’s range. Darryl ate seventeen—third most after Boris (nineteen) and Paul (twenty-two)—after which he passed out on the plaid sofa.

“Wake up, Dare. We’re home.”

Darryl rolled over onto a sore elbow and blinked at BJ. “Home?” he said groggily.

“Come on.”

The two of them were the only ones left in the RV. Stumbling after BJ to the doorway, Darryl saw that they were pulled up in front of the familiar little sky-blue house. Here in Seattle it was raining, but instead of going into the house Darryl stood on the sidewalk feeling the drops on his nose and the back of his neck, staring at the pretty little rock garden, the neatly painted shutters, a bicycle left out on the lawn next door. In spite of the rain a robin was hopping around the grass near the bike, listening for worms. Over the rooftops a seagull was wheeling in the woolen sky, dirty-white against gray.