Never Say Genius (6 page)

Before Coke took off his pants, he checked the pockets and found the tickets that Archie Clone had given him for the french fry exhibit. He turned one of them over and saw this written on the back:

Coke puzzled over the three words for a minute, and then handed the ticket to his sister.

“What do you think this means?” he asked.

Pep looked the tickets over. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“Do you think it’s just random words?”

“It may be meaningless,” Pep replied, “or it may be a cipher.”

“Oh no. Not
another
one,” Coke groaned.

Pep
loved
ciphers. While Coke’s brain excelled at accumulating and storing huge quantities of information, Pep was good at organizing and analyzing it. She loved word games, number games, and trying to untangle secret messages and codes. She was fascinated by anything to do with spies and spying.

During their drive from California, every few days Dr. Warsaw had sent them a coded message, which Pep was always able to decipher. That’s how they knew to go to The Infinity Room at The House on the Rock. Some of the messages were harder to decipher than others.

But Dr. Warsaw was dead. Or at least they
assumed
he was dead. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was alive and HATED DAY HAPPY was another secret message from him. Or maybe he had created the message before he died. Or maybe somebody
else
had taken over the Genius Files operation and was sending them ciphers now. Who knew?

Pep pulled out her notebook, lay down on the bed, and wrote out the letters. She stared at them. The cipher seemed pretty straightforward. It didn’t look like a particularly difficult code to crack.

She turned the letters backward—YPPAH YAD DETAH. Nope, that was meaningless. She wrote down every other letter, and then every third letter. She held a mirror up to the words. She transposed the letters, and then tried jumbling them around randomly. Nothing worked. Everything she did to the cipher made it look less like real words than it had at the start. She was feeling sleepy, like her brain was working at half speed.

And then, just before her eyes were about to close for the night, she figured it out.

“I got it,” she whispered to Coke. “It’s a simple anagram.”

Then she wrote something in her notebook and handed it to her brother.

HAPPY DEATH DAY

I
t wasn’t until the next morning, when the twins woke up in their motel room, that they were able to fully comprehend the seriousness of their situation. Getting rid of Dr. Warsaw at The House on the Rock had not solved their problem, as they had thought. No, their problem had just begun. People were
still
after them. Coke and Pep would have to live with that fact, maybe until they themselves were dead, or the people who were trying to kill them were dead. Maybe it was just Archie Clone who was after them now. Or maybe Mrs. Higgins and the bowler dudes were still out there somewhere too. Maybe there were others as well.

It makes it kind of hard to get through your everyday life, knowing that at any moment somebody might try to throw you off a cliff, dip you into boiling oil, drown you in a vat of SPAM, or bury you alive in a sand dune. That’s no way to live.

“We gotta tell Mom and Dad,” Coke said to his sister as they brushed their teeth that morning. “This isn’t some game. The game is over. Mom and Dad will know what to do.”

“Agreed.”

After showering and getting dressed, Coke and Pep knocked on the door of their parents’ room. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald were already dressed and ready to go downstairs to the little breakfast room next to the motel lobby. They were in the middle of a discussion about Dr. McDonald’s next book. His last one,
The Impact of Coal on the Industrial Revolution
, had not sold very well.

“Honey, maybe you should write about something a little more … commercial next time,” Mrs. McDonald suggested delicately.

“What, like Britney Spears?” Dr. McDonald replied with sarcasm in his voice. “Maybe I should write a book about Lindsay Lohan’s love life. Lots of people would buy that.”

“No, Ben, I mean—”

“We need to talk to you about something,” Coke told his parents.

“What is it, sweetie?” Mrs. McDonald said with concern as they made their way to the breakfast room.

Coke took a deep breath.

“You may find this a little hard to believe,” he began, “but Pep and I are part of a secret government program. It’s called The Genius Files.”

Silence. They continued up to the buffet line to get their food.

“Go on,” urged Dr. McDonald.

“Ever since we left California,” Pep told them, “there have been these crazy people who have been trying to kill us. They forced us to jump off a cliff back home…”

“… and they blew up a building we were in right next to our favorite Chinese restaurant…,” Coke said.

“… and they left us to die at the singing sand dune…,” Pep added.

“… and they tried to drown us at the SPAM Museum…”

“… and they tried to boil us in oil yesterday—”

Dr. McDonald held up his hand to stop them.

“So, you’re telling us that these people are still out there,” he said, “and that your lives are in danger.”

“Right,” Pep said. “We would have told you about all this earlier, but we had been sworn to secrecy.”

They sat down at a table.

“We have GPS devices implanted in our heads,” Coke added, “so the bad guys who are trying to kill us know where we are at all times.”

Dr. and Mrs. McDonald stared at the twins for a long time.

Then they burst out in hysterical laughter.

“Hooo! Hooo!” Dr. McDonald said through the tears that were streaming down his face. “That’s a good one! GPS devices in your heads!”

“It’s not even April Fools’ Day!” said Mrs. McDonald as she wiped her face with a napkin. “How do you kids come up with this stuff? You two are so imaginative!”

“No, we mean it!” Coke protested. “We’re totally serious!”

“You guys crack me up,” Dr. McDonald said, unable to stop laughing. “Bridge, I’m so glad we changed our minds and decided to have children after all. Our kids never cease to amaze me.”

“They do say the darndest things,” said Mrs. McDonald.

So much for that idea. It didn’t look like their parents were going to be any help at all. Coke and Pep would have to live … or die … on their own.

As their parents chuckled and lingered over their coffee, the twins went outside to talk things over privately.

“What are we gonna do now?” Pep asked.

“How should I know?”

“Maybe we should call the police.”

“Are you out of your mind? They’ll
never
believe us,” Coke told her. “Mom and Dad didn’t even believe us. You think the cops will?”

Ever since they were little, Coke had been the “big brother,” even though he was only a few minutes older. Pep had come to rely on him to get them out of jams using his mouth, his fists, a deck of cards, a Cheesehead, or whatever happened to be lying around.

Now, though, Coke worried about what was going to happen next. That Archie Clone who’d tried to french fry them could be anywhere. He could be watching them right now, or listening in on their conversations. They would have to track him down. They might have to kill him, before he killed them.

And what about Mrs. Higgins? What about those crazy bowler dudes? What about the other Genius Files kids who might be gunning for them so they could claim the million dollars?

And what about Dr. Warsaw? Maybe he had survived the fall and was out there somewhere, concocting more intricate secret messages and plans to kill them.

As the twins walked back to their room to pack up their stuff and check out of the motel, two maids were blocking the hallway with big carts loaded up with towels, cleaning supplies, and those little plastic shampoo bottles they leave in the rooms.

“Excuse me,” Pep said politely, assuming that would be enough to send the message that they needed to get past.

The maids didn’t turn around. One was holding a broom and the other was fiddling with a vacuum cleaner.

“Pardon me,” Coke said, a little more forcefully. “We need to get to our room.”

“No speakee Engleesh,” said one of the maids in a vague accent.

Coke rolled his eyes and pushed his way past the two carts, and gestured for Pep to follow him. That’s when both maids clapped their hands over the twins’ mouths and grabbed them forcefully from behind.

“What the—”

“Keep your mouth shut and you won’t get hurt!” one of the “maids” grunted in a male voice as Pep tried to bite the hand over her mouth.

“Let us go!” Pep tried to holler.

The maids dragged Coke and Pep roughly down the hall and used a key to open a door with no room number on it. Then they shoved the twins into the room, followed them inside, and slammed the door behind them. It was a storage room, with racks filled with towels on the walls.

“Who are you?” Pep demanded. “What do you want from us?”

The maids ripped wigs off their heads and smiled broadly.

“Mya!” yelled Pep.

“Bones!” yelled Coke.

Now, if you had read
The Genius Files: Mission Unstoppable
, you would know who Bones and Mya are. If you didn’t read that book, well, maybe next time you’ll listen when I tell you to do something.

Bones was the custodian at the twins’ school who had watched over them and initiated them into The Genius Files program. Mya was also on The Genius Files team. It was Mya who had given them wingsuits so they would survive their plunge over the cliff back home in California.

There were hugs all around. The twins were grateful to see them, even if Bones did look a little strange wearing a maid’s uniform.

“Do you work here at the motel?” Pep asked.

“Of
course
they don’t work here, you dope!” Coke said. “They’re disguised as maids so people won’t know who they really are.”

“We’re undercover,” Bones said. “I’m glad to see you two are alive and well.”

“Barely,” Pep said. “Yesterday this crazy teenager trapped us in a giant french fry cage and tried to drop us into boiling oil. What a way to celebrate our birthday.”

“Happy birthday!” Mya said cheerfully. “We wanted to get you presents, but we didn’t have time.”

“Saving our lives would have been a nice present,” Coke said as he pulled the ticket to the french fry simulator out of his pocket and showed it to Bones and Mya.

“‘Hated day happy,’” Bones read off the ticket. “What do you think that means?”

“I figured it out,” Pep said. “It means ‘happy death day.’”

“This teenager who tried to kill you,” Mya said. “What did he look like?”

“He was kind of nerdy-looking, chubby, and he had bright red hair,” Pep told them. “Like Archie, from the comics.”

Bones and Mya looked at each other.

“Archie Clone,” they said together.

“You know that kid?” Coke said.

“Oh yeah,” Bones said. “We know him. The Genius Files kid. The renegade.”

“This is precisely the reason why Dr. Warsaw had to end The Genius Files program,” Mya told them. “He thought he would simply recruit genius kids from all over the country to solve America’s problems, and they would do whatever he told them. But kids don’t always do what we grown-ups tell them to do. And geniuses like Archie Clone, well, you never know what crazy thing they might do.”

“We suspect that he might be criminally insane,” Bones added.

“Kids made fun of him at school,” Coke said. “Maybe that’s what messed him up.”

“How did Archie Clone get that big truck?” Pep asked. “And all that french fry apparatus? It must have cost somebody a fortune.”

“He figured out a way,” Bones said. “He’s a very bright and resourceful young man. Some say he’s trying to follow in Dr. Warsaw’s footsteps. He may be trying to take over The Genius Files program now that Dr. Warsaw is gone.”

“He told us he was going to kill off all The Genius Files kids,” Pep said, “so that when he turns twenty-one, he’ll be the only one left and he’ll get to keep the million dollars.”

Bones whistled.

“Did he say anything else?”

Coke and Pep thought back, trying to remember anything Archie Clone had said that might be important. Pep couldn’t think of anything, but suddenly Coke snapped his fingers.

“He did say two things.”

“What?”

“One, he collects hats,” Coke said, “and two, he said he had to give us the tour right away because he was on his way to Washington.”

“Washington, D.C., or Washington State?” Mya asked.

“He didn’t say,” Coke replied.

“Probably D.C.,” Bones said.