Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (18 page)

Biggs sidled up. “Have something for you,” he said, and offered a small envelope. It was still sealed and bore the inscription
GIVE ONLY TO ERNO
in Mr. Wilson’s familiar hand. “Found it on muh fridge this morning. Stuck there with a magnet shaped like a pie. Thought it was part of a new game.”

“That’s … weird.”

“Yuh. Don’t even
own
a pie magnet.”

“No, I mean … nobody was supposed to know where you lived, right? How’d Mr. Wilson find your tree house, much less get inside?”

Biggs shrugged. “Known him a long time. From before he was made your foster dad. Might’ve guessed where I live.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“Goodco factory. Was taking the tour. He pulled me out of line, wanted to know all about me. But … don’t like to talk all that much.”

Erno smiled a little at this.

“Asked if I liked kids,” Biggs continued. “Knew some babies needed a nanny. Said yes.”

Erno opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of folded notepaper, and a poem:

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust

We push and pull to fill the void

If change is just, then change we must

I would not see my work destroyed

P.S. Your doctor’s a hag—

Papa’s got a brand-new bag
.

P.P.S. Don’t show this to Emily
.

Erno stuffed the poem into his pocket and sighed. “He left a copy for Emily, I guess?”

“No.”

Erno frowned.
No?
It couldn’t be a new game if he was the only one playing it. Maybe it was something else entirely.

Emily emerged, and Erno took her place inside the same potty. The other one was still shut tight—he wondered if somebody could be sleeping in there.

On their return to the tree house Erno noticed Biggs glance over his shoulder a lot. Erno glanced back as well, but couldn’t figure what the big man was looking at—there was nothing behind them but a carousel and two Porta-Potties, both of their doors slightly ajar.

I
N 1991
C
ONGRESS LAUNCHED A SPECIAL INVESTIGATION
into claims that Goodco was conducting secret experiments on human subjects. These experiments were purported to involve chemical additives that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. These rumors were supported by public statements made by then Goodco vice president Paul Flanders in the fall of 1990 that the breakfast cereals of the future would “make kids smarter, and better-looking. It’s very exciting,” he continued. “We already have a kind of imitation corn that makes mice glow in the dark.” When questioned by the media, Paul Flanders attempted to clarify his statements: “They … they don’t glow
much
,” he told reporters. “It’s not like you could read by them or anything.” Later at a formal news conference, Flanders claimed that the whole thing had been a joke, and also that he was retiring
from his position at Goodco to spend more time with his family. And indeed he was with his family when they all perished in a hydrofoil accident in March of 1992.

If there was any truth to Flanders’s statements, it probably wasn’t Goodco’s first attempt at a chemical additive. According to anonymous sources, Goodco experimented in the sixties with a mixture that would “Make You Grow Up Big and Strong.” And it did make its subjects Big, and Strong, and a few other things besides (see Appendix XII,
Humboldt County v. Goodco
). The advertising department attempted to make the side effects sound like virtues:

“Goodco cereals!” went one pitch. “They’ll make you Big and Strong and Put Hair on Your Chest!”

“Goodco! The cure for baldness is here … in a fun-to-eat cereal!”

But it was eventually agreed that while people want thick, luxurious hair on their heads, they don’t necessarily want it all those other places (see
fig. 4.13
), and so the idea was scrapped.

As was the 1991 Congressional investigation, after the lead investigator himself remarked, on camera and while making a rude gesture, that he considered all accusations against Goodco to be “bollocks.” He then abruptly resigned from public office and moved to a goat farm in Pennsylvania.

Erno slept fitfully. In his dreams he worked the assembly line at Goodco, watching a shuddering steel bin fart puffed corn through a spray of artificial sweetener.

He was the only person in the factory. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else there.

In his dream the corn chute clogged. It continued to tremble angrily as Erno reached his hand up into the nozzle to pull free a small dead rabbit. Its eyes were shut tight, its fur dirty with bits of cereal and … something else. He set it aside and reached into the bin for another. Then a third rabbit, and a fourth—it was a bad clog. Then he heard a noise.

There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else there. Someone or something was sneaking around the factory.

This part of the factory looked like Erno’s house. Which was in a tree. Something was creeping through
the tree, creeping through his house. Then he heard a voice, and he woke.

It took Erno a moment to remember where he was: in a sleeping bag next to Emily, in a living room in a tree house. As he remembered, he realized he could still hear the voice from his dream. It was Biggs’s low bass, rumbling across the floor. Maybe the big man was having a weird dream, too.

Erno unsheathed himself from the sleeping bag and followed the voice to the kitchen, at which point it fell abruptly silent. Erno entered the dim kitchen to find Biggs watching him from the back door. Alone.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I had a weird dream,” Erno told him. “Were you talking to someone?”

Biggs might have turned his head just slightly and averted his eyes. It was dark. “To an invisible rabbit-man,” he finally answered.

Erno smiled. “Heh. Okay. Well, I’m going back to bed,” he said, and he did.

The night passed. It was always difficult for Erno to sleep well in a strange place, and this place was stranger than most. More difficult still is trying to sleep when there’s a bird pecking your forehead.

“Oh, you scared it,” said Emily when Erno lurched
awake. He saw a sparrow flit away and join a crowd of other birds snapping at a pile of seed in the foyer. The front door was cracked open, and Emily was sitting nearby, eating cereal.

“There are birds in the house,” said Erno, his head full of sleep. “There are birds in the house. Does … does Biggs know you let them in?”

“I didn’t. Biggs feeds the birds every morning.”

“Because if he doesn’t they peck him in the head?”

“No, silly,” Emily said with a full mouth. “It was only pecking your forehead to get at the little pile of birdseed I put there.”

Erno frowned. “You…”

Emily giggled, and Erno tried not to smile.

“If you weren’t two minutes older, I’d beat you up.”

“You could never beat me up,” said Emily. “I know seven pressure points on the human body that will make a person fall asleep. I know two others that I think will cure rabies, but I haven’t been able to test them.”

Erno got to his feet. “Really?” he said. “You should have used them on Carla Owens. Why didn’t you try them on the Goodco people?”

Emily looked anxious. “Most of the Goodco people were wearing those thick suits. It wouldn’t have worked. And … besides. I can’t think of stuff like that when…”

She trailed off, but Erno understood. They were
like members of a boy band: Emily was the smart one; Erno was the brave one. And the cute one, of course. He changed the subject.

“Is that Puftees?” he asked, pointing at her bowl. “I can’t believe you’re eating a Goodco cereal after all they’ve done!”

“It’s all Biggs has for breakfast! Seriously, go check! He wasn’t kidding when he told that pink-suit guy that he liked them.”

Erno looked around. “Where is Biggs, anyway?”

“Out back,” Emily answered. “And when he left, he took a razor with him.”

“Okay.”

“A
razor
,” she repeated.

Erno rolled his eyes. “Oh, what, the Bigfoot thing? He just has to shave! His face!”

“Maybe, but when he took a new razor from the hall closet, I got a peek inside.”

“So?”

“So go look.”

Erno stepped over to the foyer, scattering birds as he did so, and cracked the closet door. Then he opened it wide. “It’s just a … a …
whole lot
of razors,” he said. He surveyed each shelf. There were assorted toiletries, spare towels, a vacuum, and about fifty bags of disposable razors. It really was a lot of razors.

“I guess that is a little weird,” he added.

They couldn’t go to the authorities—that much they agreed on. The chief of police was a direct descendant of Jack T. Harmliss, one of Goodco’s founders, and his wife was vice president of Crunch Development. Every kid in Goodborough learned this in school. And most of the police force were probably Freemen as well—members of a 175-year-old secret club that included every rich and important person in town.

Come morning Emily wanted instead to go back to their house. She was certain Mr. Wilson would be looking for them there. So she sulked when she was outvoted, despite clearly being smart enough to understand what a bad idea it was.

“I think we should get some word to Scott,” said Erno. “Let him know we’re okay.” He’d been avoiding Denton and Louis and Roger these past couple of weeks, so he imagined that Scott might be the only person to notice if the Utz kids went missing, much less care.

“Oh, sure,” Emily snarled. “We can’t go to our house because it’s being watched. We can’t go to the police because they’re Freemen. But we should totally pay Scott a visit—they’ll never find us there. We can ask his mom how work’s going at Goodco.”

“Goodco people might know who your friends are,” Biggs agreed.

“And if they
do
, then Scott might be in trouble, and it’s our fault. Shouldn’t we check?”

Biggs looked glum. “Dangerous,” he said.

“Probably not. I don’t think they’re that on the ball. If they’d been watching us that closely, they’d know where Mr. Wilson was.”

Biggs scratched his chin.

“You didn’t hear what that doctor woman said,” Erno continued. “They thought Mr. Wilson was taking care of the whole thing. They trusted him to just bring us in to Goodco himself.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Emily, her cheeks growing pink. “Dad never would have gone along with it. He must not have known.”

On the subject of their foster father, and on this alone, Erno could claim to be the smart one. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as he thought it would be. “Mr. Wilson
was
the one who gave you the pink chemical. The IntelliJuice, or whatever.”

“ThinkDrink. And he thought it was ear medicine.”

Erno studied Emily for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right. You’re
always
right. But… I still want to check on Scott. He’s either safe—in which case we should let him know
we’re
safe—or he’s not, and he needs our help.”

So it was agreed. Emily thought she might even be able to use Scott’s computer to research Goodco. The tree house was a remarkable piece of work, but it didn’t have any conveniences that had been invented after 1970.

Emily was already blindfolded and waiting at the front door when Biggs and Erno joined her. “We’ll be back before dark,” Biggs said loudly, which was odd because he so rarely raised his voice, much less spoke when he didn’t absolutely have to. Then he gathered them up for another life-affirming drop to the ground, and ten minutes later they were at the car.

While he lay like luggage in the back of the Citroën, Erno thought about Mr. Wilson’s new riddle. Particularly that last line:

P.P.S. Don’t show this to Emily
.

At this point Erno was inclined to do the exact opposite of anything Mr. Wilson asked of him, but he remembered the look Emily got each time the man was mentioned. What would it do to her to know he was still toying with them like this? It seemed now like his sister had always been running a maze, wending her way toward the rumor of some warm and nourishing reward while Mr. Wilson took careful notes from above. It turned Erno’s stomach to think of it.