The Dragonfly Effect

by Gordon Korman

  “Has everybody gone crazy?” Brassmeyer bawled.

  Tommy caught sight of the dashboard clock. No — not crazy. It was nine, and this had to be part of the big disaster Jax had been talking about.

  Oh, no! Did this mean the others had failed?

  That was when he saw the cement truck. It was roaring along the wrong side of the road, heading straight for them. The colonel was reaching for the steering wheel, but he couldn’t get his arm all the way across the cab.

  Desperately, Tommy thought back to the farmhouse. There was a word — some kind of trigger — that would reverse the effects of this! What was it? Aurora? No, that was the name of the whole thing —

  The cement truck was bearing down on them, close enough for Tommy to see its driver sitting motionless, his hands off the wheel. There was no time left! What was that word? It was impossible to think with Brassmeyer cursing in his ear.

  “Dragonfly!” It popped out of him like a champagne cork.

  Instantly, the tow truck’s driver came back to himself. He grabbed the wheel and swerved just in time to avoid a head-on collision with the cement mixer. They screeched to a halt on the shoulder and sat gasping.

  Brassmeyer rolled down his window for air, and that was when they heard it. People, dozens of them, were running out of houses and stores, shouting the same word:

  “Dragonfly!”

  And the chaos on the road was starting to come under control.

  The plane hurtled down at them, screaming as it plunged from the sky. The three hypnotists could only watch in awe, imagining the fiery impact. Even if Jax had known that his parents were aboard, his horror could not have been any greater.

  “No,” Kira barely whispered.

  A crash seemed inevitable, mere seconds away. The airliner was so close that Jax could see — or was it a mirage? — the terrified pilot in the cockpit, straining against the controls.

  Then, almost by magic, the jet pulled out of its dive, missing the top of the UN by perhaps thirty feet. It climbed, banking over Manhattan.

  “That was —” Stanley croaked. He lacked the breath to finish his sentence.

  “— close,” Jax supplied. His entire body was vibrating at high frequency, like a guitar string.

  It wasn’t until the plane had turned east toward the airport that the three had a chance to take in the state of the city around them.

  The cars packing First Avenue were dented and smashed, front ends leaking fluids and issuing steam. Hypnotized drivers sat behind deployed airbags. The sidewalks were clogged with pedestrians standing stock-still, and vehicles that had climbed the curb, and bumped into storefronts and poles. Awnings and signs had come down; mailboxes and trash cans had toppled over; plate-glass windows had shattered. Burglar alarms wailed.

  A double-decker sightseeing bus drove into the side of a building. Its tires spun and burned rubber as its driver’s foot grew heavy on the gas pedal. A few tourists were crying out for rescue, but most sat, impassive. On the East River, a ferry collided with the dock, bounced off, and bobbed there, disabled.

  Everywhere, plumes of smoke rose — dozens, no, hundreds of them. To the east — more smoke over Queens and farther out on Long Island.

  “Look,” mourned Stanley, surveying the chaos.

  To Jax, it was eerily familiar. He had seen it happen to tiny Delta Prime in the Arizona desert. Now it was vast New York, and beyond that, the entire planet. Somewhere, all the people he’d ever known must be caught up in this — the soldiers at Fort Calhoun, his classmates in Manhattan and Connecticut, Tommy, Mom, and Dad. But it seemed selfish to dwell on that because everybody was caught up in it. No one would escape the chaos that had begun, and understanding what it was or how it worked only made it more horrifying. Jax had heard the projected numbers whispered around HoWaRD after the original Operation Aurora: how many billions in damage; how many injuries; how many deaths.

  The world was about to find out.

  “What happens now?” asked Stanley in awe.

  Jax did not reply. There was nothing to say. How did you tell an eight-year-old that the end of the world had started — and by his own hand?

  At first, the shouting failed to breach the cocoon of Jax’s misery. Then Kira elbowed him in the ribs. “Listen!”

  The wailing of alarms and sirens was punctuated by the voices of people yelling, whooping, shrieking a single word:

  “Dragonfly!”

  Once Jax heard it, he realized it was coming from everywhere — windows, doorways, balconies, and rooftops. A fire truck squeezed around the corner, honking its air horn and broadcasting “Dragonfly!” over its external speaker. The UN’s public-address system burst to life, blasting the word up and down First Avenue. The message was passed from building to building and block to block all around the city.

  The three hypnotists watched in astonishment as the thousands of frozen figures stirred and came back to life. Pedestrians moved again. Drivers stepped out of their cars and faced their fender benders. People came down from buildings and flooded the streets. The newly awakened rushed to help the injured. And through it all, the chorus seemed to swell:

  “Dragonfly! Dragonfly! Dragonfly!”

  Slowly, incredibly, New York City was returning to normal.

  “It can’t be just here, right?” Kira asked anxiously. “This must be happening everywhere!”

  Jax nodded slowly, almost reluctant to jinx this miracle recovery with too much hope. “The command went out to the biggest audience in history.”

  “We did it!” cheered Stanley.

  Jax and Kira both hugged him.

  As the effects of the global Aurora began to diminish, police sirens sounded around the city. It was good news, Jax knew. The first responders were recovered enough to do their jobs. Order was about to be restored.

  “We should probably get out of here,” he decided. “You know, before a few hundred world leaders remember something about kids at the UN.”

  “Where are we going to go?” asked Stanley, who had left all the family he’d ever known flaked out on the dais of the General Assembly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jax replied. “Just away. Right now, that’s the only direction we have to worry about. I hope you’ve got your hiking boots on. It’ll be hours before these roads are clear.”

  Stanley pointed. “We don’t have to walk. Look!”

  At the base of the flag of Uruguay stood Black Quack, perfectly behaved, waiting patiently.

  Moments later, there were reports of one of the stranger sights of that very strange morning — three young people riding through the gridlocked city on a magnificent black thoroughbred.

  As countries around the globe took stock of the damage caused by the extraordinary events of October 24, the numbers began to mount up. Seven and a half million minor injuries, ranging from cuts and bruises to small burns and broken bones. Eleven million traffic accidents, mostly fender benders.

  Remarkably, not a single person was killed.

  The world got off easy.

  Reports and statistics came from every country, province, city, town, and village. Yet no one had the answer to one very simple question: Why? What had made upward of a billion people suddenly stop dead?

  Theories abounded. Astronomers proposed that a large solar flare might have bombarded the earth with photons and affected human minds. Doctors suggested that this was a side effect of fluoride in drinking water. Geophysicists speculated that this might be the first sign of the earth’s magnetic poles reversing. The UFO Society concluded it was a mind-control experiment conducted by an alien spacecraft. A group called Ban Technology Now put the blame on “brain hackers” who had found a way to beam a virus directly into people’s heads through social media. There was even a cult that believed the millions shouting “Dragonfly!” proved that a giant, all-powerful insect was in charge of the universe.

  “Talk about stupid,” was Tommy’s opinion. “Not one of them said mass hypnotism. It’s so obvious!”


  “You don’t know anything about that,” Jax warned. “And you better forget what you do know. No good can ever come from people finding out what really happened.”

  The two were at I.S. 222, which was the only place they could get together these days. Tommy had been grounded for his twenty-four-hour disappearing act. He tried to convince his parents that he’d been wrapped up in the temporary insanity that had come to be called “The Dragonfly Effect.” The Cicerellis weren’t buying it.

  Jax was happy that the Opuses were in New York again. The aftermath of global chaos wasn’t the most convenient time for a cross-country move. But nothing would stop Mom and Dad once they got the green light to start putting their old lives back together again. Monica Opus had already rented an office to restart her chiropractic clinic. Ashton couldn’t return to his old job, since everyone at the Bentley dealership had been hypnotized to forget he’d ever worked there. However, Manhattan Bugatti remembered his great reputation as a sales manager and hired him on the spot. Things were finally looking up for Mom and Dad. After all the sacrifices they’d made to protect their son, Jax felt fantastic about that.

  What had really made all this possible was the fact that Dr. Mako was no longer a threat to the Opuses or to anybody else. When the police had discovered the identity of the unconscious man at the United Nations, he’d been arrested as an escaped convict. It soon became apparent, though, that this was not the same Elias Mako who’d escaped from a maximum-security prison. The mesmeric attack of the combined powers of Jax and Stanley had left him an empty shell, with very little mind and no memory. He was judged incompetent to go back to jail and sent to live out the rest of his days in a New York nursing home.

  Jax and Kira paid him one visit just to prove to themselves that the world was now safe from this man. It was a shock to see him. His black hair was streaked with gray, his expression blank, his eyes vacant. He looked easily thirty years older than before.

  He sat in an arts-and-crafts class, rolling a ball of clay between his palms. When Jax and Kira introduced themselves, there was no spark of recognition. His speech was slurred, the commanding voice gone.

  “Nice to meet you,” he told them.

  “Wow,” breathed Kira afterward. “I never thought I’d say this, but I actually feel bad for Dr. Mako.”

  “I don’t,” Jax said firmly. “Think about what he tried to do — and how close he came to succeeding.”

  “He said he wanted to use hypnotism to make the world a better place.”

  “Right,” Jax put in sarcastically. “A better place for him.”

  Kira was not convinced. “We can’t be sure what his intentions were at the very beginning. He might have started out good, but the power corrupted him. Maybe hypnotism is just too dangerous to be used by anybody.”

  The United States military seemed to agree. Shortly after the events of October 24, the army shut down its Hypnotic Warfare Research Department on the grounds that mesmeric power was fundamentally unstable. There was no formal announcement. HoWaRD hadn’t officially existed in the first place, so it couldn’t technically be disbanded.

  Colonel Brassmeyer was transferred to a “safer” unit in charge of tracking down loose nukes. Captain Pedroia retired from the army and went into private practice. The psychiatrist and his fiancée were adopting a child — eight-year-old Stanley X, soon to be Stanley Pedroia, an ordinary third grader in Dubuque, Iowa. The military’s top computer experts made sure that no one would ever find Stanley’s face on an Internet video that had very nearly demolished human civilization.

  The army was out of the hypnotism business. None of it had ever happened.

  “Would Jackson Opus please report to Principal Orenstein’s office.”

  In the cafeteria, Tommy shot Jax a raised eyebrow. “Still thrilled to be back at school?”

  Jax grinned. “I took on Mako. What do I have to fear from Orenstein? A detention? After what I’ve been through, I’d gladly drop to my knees and kiss the floor of the detention room.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Tommy countered. “All you have to do is bend the guy. Detention? What detention? Straight As? No problem. Student body president? Wouldn’t you rather be king?”

  “That stops right here,” Jax announced sternly. “No more hypnotism. I made a promise to myself and to Axel Braintree’s memory that I’m never going to use that power again.”

  Tommy was unimpressed. “I give you three days. A week, tops.”

  “I really mean it, Tommy. Evelyn Lolis is back in town and she’s starting up the meetings behind the Laundromat.”

  “You mean that Sandman’s Guild?” Tommy asked.

  “Well, it’s Sandperson’s Guild now, but it’s the same thing. Kira’s going with me. We’re going to kick the hypnotism habit once and for all.”

  He bused his tray and made for the main office, taking in his surroundings as if noticing them for the first time. How many long afternoons had he walked these halls, staring from clock to clock, willing the day to hurry up and be over? The place was almost sacred to him now. A normal life — how precious was that?

  Principal Orenstein was waiting for him with his entire student file spread out across the desk.

  “We have a problem here, Jackson, and I can’t quite figure it out. You’re in eighth grade, but there’s no evidence here of you having completed the seventh-grade exams. I know you’ve been at other schools, but those records should have been forwarded automatically. I can’t have an eighth grader who’s never finished seventh.”

  Jax took a deep breath. Even Axel had admitted that controlling the urge to use hypnotism was a matter of one day at a time.

  I guess this isn’t my day.

  He stared at his principal, the irises that had saved the world darkening from green to blue to violet.

  “Look into my eyes….”

  Gordon Korman is the #1 bestselling author of five books in The 39 Clues series as well as seven books in his Swindle series: Swindle, Zoobreak, Framed, Showoff, Hideout, Jackpot, and Unleashed. His other books include This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! (published when he was fourteen); The Toilet Paper Tigers; Radio Fifth Grade; The Chicken Doesn’t Skate; the trilogies Island, Everest, Dive, Kidnapped, and Titanic; and the series On the Run. He lives in New York with his family and can be found on the web at www.gordonkorman.com.

  Look for more action and humor from

  GORDON KORMAN

  The Hypnotists series

  The Hypnotists

  Memory Maze

  The Swindle series

  Swindle

  Zoobreak

  Framed

  Showoff

  Hideout

  Jackpot

  Unleashed

  The Titanic trilogy

  The Kidnapped trilogy

  The On the Run series

  The Dive trilogy

  The Everest trilogy

  The Island trilogy

  Radio Fifth Grade

  The Toilet Paper Tigers

  The Chicken Doesn’t Skate

  This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!

  Copyright © 2015 by Gordon Korman

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957877

  First edition, August 2015

  Cover illustration by Tim O’Brien

  Cover design by Nina Goffi

  e-ISBN
978-0-545-50340-2

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