The Genius Files #4 (20 page)

But that's a
different
Colorado River. The Colorado around Austin is a slow-moving river, with dams that created man-made lakes within the city limits. The rowboat floated almost peacefully away from the shore.

“Where are we?” Pep asked.

“On a lake or a river,” Coke replied. “Probably a river. I feel movement.”

He struggled to free his hands from the ropes. It was hot, and he was sweating. Coke was careful not to rock the boat. Capsizing it could be catastrophic.

“What if we're going to go over a waterfall?” Pep asked, sudden panic in her voice. “What if we're going to go over Niagara Falls!”

“This is
Texas
, you dope,” her brother replied. “Here, let's turn around so we're back-to-back. Then you can try to loosen my rope, and I can try to loosen yours.”

Very carefully, the twins maneuvered around in the little rowboat until they were facing in opposite directions. Pep's fingers were slightly smaller than her brother's, which made it easier for her to pick at the knot.

Working together, they were making progress. If they could loosen their hands, they could get the blindfolds off their faces. Then they'd be free.

“What's that squeaking noise?” Pep asked as she worked at the rope.

“It sounds like birds,” her brother replied.

“They're getting closer,” Pep said, “and I think something just dripped on my head. Ewww, what is that
smell
?”

“Forget the smell,” Coke replied excitedly. “I'm almost free!”

The last knot came loose. Coke pulled the rope off his hands and ripped the blindfold from his face. Instantly, he saw what was making the noise and the smell.

“Bats!” he shouted.

Yes, bats. Not the kind you use to hit a baseball. I'm talking about furry, flying mammals with webbed wings.
Those
kinds of bats.

It just so happens that the largest urban bat colony in North America lives under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas. Every day around sunset, more than a million Mexican free-tailed bats emerge from the underside of the bridge and go out for dinner at the same time.

With her brother's help, Pep ripped the blindfold off her face, but maybe she shouldn't have. A three-and-a-half-inch gray bat was flying directly toward her head, only to veer away at the last instant.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek!”
Pep screamed, ducking and covering her face. “They're
everywhere
!”

Indeed they were. The swarm of bats coming from the bottom of the bridge was like a dark cloud swirling around the little boat. Mexican free-tailed bats can fly as fast as sixty miles per hour, diving, twisting, screeching, and crapping the whole time.
Anyone
would be terrified to be in the middle of them.

“Stay still!” Coke shouted over the screeching.

“Are you crazy?” Pep shrieked back. “Bats suck blood! They have rabies! I'm covered in bat poop!”

“They aren't aggressive!” Coke insisted. “Bats don't
care about people! They eat insects!”

Well, he was right about
that
. A bat's diet consists of moths, beetles, dragonflies, wasps, and ants. They can consume up to one-half of their body weight in insects each night.

“But there are
millions
of them!” Pep shrieked, waving her arms around frantically. “And they're blind! They're blind as bats!”

“Be calm! Close your eyes!” Coke advised. “They use echolocation for navigation and detecting prey! They won't touch you!”

He was right about that too. Bats “see” with their ears. They emit noises and listen to the echoes to sense objects around them. That's how they avoid flying into things, such as people who happen to be sitting in boats under bridges.

“Screw that!” Pep screamed. “I'm outta here!”

With that, she hurled herself off the side of the boat.

“Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea,” Coke said, just before diving into the river himself.

Their heads popped out of the water at the same time. The swarm of bats was even thicker now. They almost blocked out the sky.

“Get underwater!” Pep shouted.

Both twins filled their lungs with air and submerged
for as long as they could hold their breath. When Coke finally came up for air, the bats were still swarming all over. He gulped some air and swam under the rowboat, pushing it from the bottom to turn it upside down and create a little shelter over his head. Pep surfaced and ducked under the boat too.

After what seemed like forever—but was actually just a few minutes—the last of the bats had flown out from under the bridge. The air was suddenly still. It was over. It would be a while until all those bats returned from dinner.

Together, exhausted, the twins swam toward the riverbank. When they made it to the edge, two hands reached down to pull them up on the shore.

It was their parents.

“You two are
so
grounded!” their father shouted.

A
s soon as Coke and Pep got out of the water, their parents were all over them, like bats under a bridge.

“Where have you two
been
all day?”

“We told you to meet us outside the
museum
!”

“Why were you in the
river
?”

“What were you
thinking
?”

“You had us worried
sick
!”

“We were scared to
death
!”

“We filed a
police report
!”

Pep looked to her brother, as usual, to do the talking.

“Okay, here's what happened,” Coke tried to explain. “We were kidnapped from the museum by these guys in bowler hats. They locked us in a room all afternoon. Then they tied us up and brought us out to the river. They put us in a boat and the bats came out and—”

“Don't give me that, mister!” Dr. McDonald shouted. “We've heard enough of your wild stories!”

The parents were even angrier when they found out the twins no longer had their cell phones. Not a word was spoken in the car on the way to the Econo Lodge Arboretum in North Austin. Coke and Pep knew that any excuse they could come up with wouldn't fly with their parents.

“You are
not
to leave this room tonight,” Dr. McDonald said coldly after they had checked into the hotel. “You are
not
to turn on the TV. You are
not
to take anything out of the minibar. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah,” both twins replied glumly.

“In case of emergency—and there
better
not
be an emergency—your father and I will be listening to music at Antone's on Fifth Street,” said Mrs. McDonald. “You two can sit here and think about what you did.”

After their parents left, Coke and Pep took showers and changed into dry clothes. They tried reading for a while, but it was hard to focus after what they had been through.

“Want to watch TV?” Coke asked.

“Mom and Dad told us we weren't allowed to watch TV.”

“How are they gonna know?”

“They'll know,” Pep said. “There's probably a chip in the TV that records what we watch.”

“You're paranoid.”

There was nothing else to do. A thought popped into Pep's head. They had received a new cipher when they were at the Museum of the Weird. She didn't remember it, but her brother would. She got out her notepad and had him write the cipher down:

7-14-12-4-14-5-19-7-4-2-17-8-2-10-4-19-12
-
0-18-19-4-17

Coke looked at the numbers and shook his head. It was impossible.

“Think of it this way,” Pep said. “Each number probably stands for a letter. We just have to break it down and figure out which one.”

Pep wrote out the alphabet, and then put the numbers
1
through
26
under the letters.

“This would be the simplest solution,” she continued. “The number
7
is under
G
, so
7
probably means
G
. The number
14
is under
N
, so the second letter is
N
.”

“There aren't many words that start with
GN
,” Coke noted. “Gnat, gnome . . .”

Pep went on, and decoded the first ten letters. It spelled
GNLDNESGDB
.

“I made a mistake somewhere,” she said, looking up. “This doesn't make any sense.”

“Maybe you put the wrong numbers under the letters,” her brother suggested.

Pep looked at the letters and numbers for a few minutes, and then crossed out everything she had written. Below, she wrote the alphabet out again, this time starting with a zero under the letter
A
, number
1
under the letter
B
, number
2
under the letter
C
, and so on.

“So now the
7
is under the letter
H
,” Pep said. “So
7
must mean
H
. And
14
is under the letter
O
, so
14
must mean
O
. The first two letters are
H-O
.”

“M is above
12
, so
12
means
M
,” Coke said. “
E
is above
4
, so
4
means
E
.”

“The first four letters are
H-O-M-E
,” Pep said,
writing them out excitedly.

They continued like that, matching up the numbers with the letters directly above them. Soon they had the whole message:

HOMEOFTHECRICKETMASTER

“Home of the cricket master!” Pep exclaimed. “That's what it means! But what's a cricket master?”

“There used to be a video game called Cricket Master,” Coke recalled, “I think I played it once at somebody's birthday party.”

Pep went to the other side of the room to get her mother's laptop computer. They were told that they weren't allowed to turn on the TV. Nobody said they couldn't use the computer.

She Googled “Cricket Master.” Naturally, twenty-seven
million
results came up. A lot of them concerned the video game Coke had mentioned. There was also a British cricket player named Jack Hobbs, who was known as “the Master.” But none of the results seemed to mean anything important.

“We struck out
again
,” Pep said. “‘Cricket master' has nothing to do with
anything
.”

“
Nothing
has anything to do with anything!” Coke said in frustration. “None of these clues connect with any of the other clues.”

Nevertheless, Pep added the new one to her list. . . .

1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

3. HUB CITY

4. TEXAS RANGER

5. HOME OF THE CRICKET MASTER

W
hen Dr. and Mrs. McDonald got back to the hotel later that night, they were in a much better frame of mind. They even brought back a souvenir—a
KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD
refrigerator magnet. But Coke and Pep were asleep. Escaping from a swarm of bats does tend to sap your energy.

In the morning, the family set out for San Antonio, which is eighty miles south of Austin on I-35. The angry feelings of the night before were gone, or at least pushed below the surface for the time being.

“What's in San Antonio?” Pep asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

“The Alamo, of
course
,” her father replied.

“Isn't that a rental car place?” Coke asked. “Why would we want to go
there
?”