by James Ponti
“Grandfather, no!” I shouted out to him. But it was too late. He’d already pulled the trigger, and the bullet ripped right through Marek’s chest.
When he raised his lantern and looked closer at our faces, he realized what he’d done and rushed to Marek’s aid.
“I didn’t know it was you,” he wailed as he ran to him.
But a funny thing happened when he got there. Marek didn’t need any aid.
“Hello, Grandfather,” he said matter-of-factly as a trickle of green slime drained from the fresh hole in his chest. “It seems as though we have a problem.”
Grandfather fainted right on the spot. We carried him into the house, and when he regained consciousness, we moved into the dining room, where we had eaten so many Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. There we tried to explain something that simply defied all explanation. The only thing that made him somewhat open to our wild claims was the fact that Marek had survived the gunshot with no serious injury.
By sunrise, the man we’d called Grandpa Auggie as children had a plan of action. He wanted us to check into the hospital that was right there on the island.
None of us wanted anything to do with that. Known as the Asylum, the hospital had a notorious reputation for mistreating the mentally ill. Just a few years earlier, the horrors of what happened there had been uncovered in an exposé by a journalist named Nellie Bly, who had posed as a patient.
“We are not crazy,” Marek said, his voice rising. “These injuries may defy logic, but they are real, not imagined.”
Our grandfather assured us that things had changed dramatically and for the better. The Asylum was now a hospital that treated all patients with top doctors. It was also looking to expand and wanted to purchase family land. Grandpa Auggie told us that he could use this as leverage to get us the best treatment and care.
“You are my blood, and I promise I will protect you to the ends of the earth,” he said firmly. “This is where I can make sure that you are treated properly.”
Reluctantly, we agreed. That morning the thirteen of us arrived at the main entrance to the hospital, a building known as the Octagon.
Initially, we were given first-class treatment, just as our grandfather had promised. Doctors and specialists ran endless series of tests trying to figure out what had caused our condition. They tried to understand why we had no pulse and felt no pain. They tested our suddenly overdeveloped sense of smell.
They were especially fascinated by the fact that each one of us had an identical scar on our right shoulder. It was purplish blue and in the shape of a crescent moon. It was the only injury consistent among each of us.
But the more tests they ran, the more confused they became. Before long, they seemed to view us not as patients to be treated, but as oddities to be feared. By the third day, we were moved into a large basement ward that was little more than a dungeon with solid rock walls.
The walls, however, were made of Manhattan schist, and the longer we were kept there, the stronger we became. My legs, which had been weak ever since my childhood accident, were suddenly powerful and straight. One time, I saw Marek twist the iron frame of a bed like it was nothing.
The continued exposure also magnified our moods. More than ever, Marek was prone to fits of anger and rage. Many of them were directed at me because he saw me as the cause of the accident.
Eventually, the doctors determined that there was no medical explanation for why we were the way we were and therefore no way to treat us. Instead, a secret panel was created to determine what should be done with us. It was a panel of the so-called “three wise men,” who represented the most important sectors of city life. It included the mayor, the Catholic archbishop, and the chief of police, a young man named Teddy Roosevelt, who five years later became president of the United States.
Each one of us was questioned individually by the panel. I spoke with them on three separate occasions and developed an instant kinship with Mr. Roosevelt, who shared my love of science.
It soon became evident, however, that even these wise men didn’t know what to do with us. We were beyond explanation and as a result were a threat to society. We began to worry that we’d never be allowed to leave the dungeon. Soon, even our own grandfather stopped visiting us. One day, we heard from a nurse that his construction company had just been awarded a large contract with the city. He had traded our well-being for financial gain.
We felt betrayed and abandoned. And Marek . . . well . . . he just felt empowered.
One day, he stood on top of a table in our dungeon and made an announcement.
“It is time for this to end,” he proclaimed. “And for that to happen, I must take charge again. Two times, I have let others tell us what to do. The first was with Milton and his explosives. That mistake is what put us in this condition in the first place.”
He paused for a moment, and I felt all eyes beating down on me. I did not run away, but I also did not say anything in my defense.
“The next was when I trusted our grandfather to decide our fate. That mistake is how we wound up where we are. I promise you that I will never let anyone else take control of us again. Trust me and follow me and I will get us out of here and onto a new life.”
“How?” asked Elias.
Marek flashed a terrifying smile and signaled the others to come closer. I could not tell if I was still part of the group, so I remained where I was.
Then he told them his deadly plan.
Family Time
I love my sister Beth. I really do. My problem is that I just can’t stand her. Scientifically speaking, we both have forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three from each parent. But that means there are also twenty-three chromosomes from each parent that we didn’t inherit. And while I haven’t run our DNA through a gene sequencer or anything, I’m pretty sure Beth and I each took the opposite twenty-three from Mom and Dad. She got all of the cheerleading, popular, “My life is one big teen soap opera” chromosomes, and I took all the, you know, lame ones.
And it’s not just that we don’t have anything in common. It’s that almost every conversation turns into an argument. Anytime one of her possessions is not in the exact location she expects it to be, I get the blame. I mean, just because I borrow her clothes every once in a while doesn’t mean I want all of her junk. Still, there she was storming into my room, making an accusation.
“Where’s my phone?” she demanded.
At the time, I was trying to figure out why my Internet connection had gone down, so I was too busy to bother turning around. I just kept clicking the reconnect button and answered, “How should I know?”
“Because you took it.”
See what I mean? Every time.
“I didn’t take your stupid phone,” I said, still without giving her the satisfaction of eye contact.
“It was recharging on the counter, and now it’s gone,” she continued. “If you didn’t take it, then what happened to it?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe it got sick of listening to your idiotic conversations and threw itself out the window. Or maybe it died of embarrassment because of that stupid pink case you put on it. But I have no idea where your phone is.”
“I’m going to count to ten, and if you don’t give it to me, I’m going to I tell Dad.”
“All the way up to ten?” I said. “You need help with that math?”
We gave each other dueling stink eyes for a second, and then both of us raced toward the kitchen. In these situations, it’s essential for me to reach Dad first, before Beth can start filling his head with misinformation. Unfortunately, she beat me to the door and then butt-blocked me the entire way down the hall. When we got to the kitchen, Dad was getting ready to make dinner.
“Dad,” Beth whined. “Molly took my phone and won’t tell me where it is.”
“Dad,” I said at the exact same time. “Beth always accuses me of stuff, and there’s never any evidence. It’s not fair.”
“Time-out,” he
said, making a T with his hands. “Let’s settle down. We’ll get to the phone and the accusations in a moment . . . but first things first. . . . Is this new apron too frilly? Or am I pulling it off?”
“Dad?!” we both whined in unison.
“Okay, okay, we’ll skip my problems and work with yours,” he said. “Let me get this straight. Beth, your phone is gone?”
“Yes.”
“But if it’s gone,” he said in his goofy, over-the-top way, “then how will you text anyone?”
Beth completely missed the sarcasm. “That’s the problem. I can’t.”
“O-M-G,” he replied.
“Wait a second,” she said, finally getting it. “You took my phone?”
“Y-E-S.”
I folded my arms and gave her my best self-righteous look. “I’ll just wait here for my apology.”
Instead of an apology, I got attitude. “You know, you’d look more like a victim of unfair accusations if you weren’t wearing my sweatshirt.”
I looked down at what I was wearing and realized I’d been busted. But of course I wasn’t going to admit to that. “I thought this was a family sweatshirt,” I offered lamely. “For all of us to wear.”
“There’s no such thing,” she said.
Then it occurred to me that if Dad took her phone, then maybe . . .
“Does that mean you have something to do with the Internet being down too?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Would disconnecting the router and hiding it in the same spot where I hid Beth’s phone make the Internet go down?”
I sighed. “Yes, it would.”
“Then yes, I had something to do with that, too,” he answered. “It sounds like I’ve been pretty busy. But on the plus side, the three of us now have some free time to hang out. You know . . . like a family.”
Beth and I both made identical groans. (Okay, so maybe we have a couple of genes in common.)
“Do we have any choice in this?” Beth asked.
“Of course you do,” he said. “I’m not some evil dictator. I’ll let you decide what we’re going to do.”
“What are our options?” I asked.
“Well, we can make dinner together, eat dinner together, and talk to one another during the whole time we’re making and eating dinner.”
“Or?” Beth asked, clearly unimpressed with option one.
“Or,” he said, “we can go to your grandmother’s house, and I can show you how to massage her calves and pumice the calluses on her feet. Totally your choice.”
Beth almost laughed, but she was trying to prove a point, so she wasn’t going to give in that easily. “I should call your bluff and pick Grandma,” she said.
Now Dad laughed. “If you don’t think I’d go through with it and make you actually chisel those suckers down, well, then you haven’t been paying attention for the last seventeen years.”
I needed no more convincing than that. “I vote dinner.”
“That’s my girl,” Dad said. “What about you, Beth? Care to make it unanimous?”
“Okay, but I want to go on record as saying that you, in fact, are nowhere near pulling that off,” she said, pointing at his apron.
“That’s what I thought,” he said as he took it off and handed it to her. “I guess that means you’ll have to wear it and take the lead.”
“Sucker,” I said, pointing at her.
“Normally, I don’t condone taunting,” he said, giving me a high five, “but she did walk right into that.”
That night, Beth and I learned how to make crawfish jambalaya with maple butter cornbread. Of course, you don’t just learn a recipe with Dad. There’s a whole production that goes into it. In fact, there are a few things that are guaranteed to happen anytime you cook with him.
Most important, you’re going to end up with an incredible meal. I’m not just saying this because he’s my dad. He’s an amazing cook. He can take something simple like spaghetti and turn it into the best meal you’ve ever had. But along the way you’re going to have to put up with goofy accents that are directly related to the food. That means while he’s making the life-changing spaghetti, he gives you a lot of “Molly, that’s-a not-a da way to make-a da meatball.”
Finally, no matter what he’s making, there will be one point during the meal when he drops the accent, gets serious, and claims that this one particular food provides the key to understanding the universe. He’ll literally say, “You see, Molly, a peanut butter sandwich is just like life,” or “Girls, if you can figure out what toppings to put on a pizza, you can figure out how to make the world a better place.” (For the record, the peanut butter sandwich is like life because sometimes the simplest things provide the most enjoyment, and pizza toppings teach you the value of diversity, bringing out the best in all of us.)
This night was no exception. The jambalaya was incredibly good, and the ridiculous Cajun accent was incredibly bad. (Funny but bad.) And how is jambalaya like life?
“Look at all the ingredients,” he said a few bites in. “It has crawfish, sausage, peppers, onions, rice, all with unique tastes. But if you add just a little bit of hot sauce, the taste of all those things changes. It’s amazing how just a little bit of something in the right place can change the world around it.”
“That’s really deep, Dad,” Beth mocked. “Color me amazed.”
“Yeah,” I added. “You just changed my entire outlook on life.”
“You tease, but you know I’m right.”
Also amazing was the fact that Beth and I had spent more than two hours together without a single disagreement or accusation. It took her a little while to warm up to the whole cooking idea, and it was a struggle for me to chop okra with a cast on my hand, but we laughed a lot, caught up with one another’s lives, and had a really nice time.
When we were done, Dad reached into a drawer and pulled out Beth’s phone and the router.
“Before I give these back,” he said, dangling them in a tempting manner. “There’s a new policy in the Bigelow house.”
Beth and I both started to moan, but he cut us off.
“Just hear me out,” he said. “You’re both busy with school and friends, and that’s great. And I work crazy hours, and that’s not going to change. But in the old days, Mom used to take care of this. She would plan little day trips for us that we all enjoyed.”
“Like the zoo,” I said.
“Or the time we went to that corn maze,” Beth said with a laugh. “And we got lost in the maze.”
“And then again on the drive home,” added Dad.
“Those trips were great,” I said.
“Yes, they were,” Dad agreed. “So, like it is with most things regarding your mother, it’s going to take all three of us to accomplish what she did by herself.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I want us to make time to do one special thing together every week or so,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be big or long, but it has to be together. And we’ll take turns planning them.”
I was game, but I wasn’t sure Beth would go for it.
“What qualifies as special?” she asked with a slight hint of attitude.
“Anything I do with the two of you is special to me,” he answered, totally melting away her resistance.
“Okay,” she said as he gave her phone back to her. “It sounds great.”
The Whole Enchilada
Sometimes Omega work can be scary, like when you’re locked in hand-to-hand combat with a completely unhinged Level 3 zombie who’s intent on killing you. And sometimes it can be nerve-racking, like when you’re hiding in an abandoned catacomb and holding your breath so that you don’t make a noise and get discovered. But what I never would have imagined is that sometimes Omega work can be really . . . boring. I’m talking mind-numbingly, eye-glazingly, fall-asleep-in-the-middle-of-a-sentence boring. But that’s exactly what it was the first two weeks we worked on the Baker’s Dozen.
Ever
y day after school, we went to the secret room in the attic of the Flatiron Building and—get ready to be totally jealous—we sorted papers. (I know. You wish you were me right now, don’t you?)
Natalie is something of an organization freak, so we sorted through more than a hundred years of notes, newspaper clippings, logbook entries, and other really dull things so that we could create a two-page document she named “The Whole Enchilada.” Her idea was that since we weren’t allowed to take anything out of the room, we needed to cram the most important information into something small enough to memorize.
“You realize you’re ruining one of my favorite foods by calling it this,” Alex protested one day. “Now, instead of cheesy deliciousness, the word ‘enchilada’ makes me think of endless paperwork. I hope that makes you happy.”
“Yeah,” she said, not missing a beat. “It kind of does.”
Grayson had a problem with it too. But it had nothing to do with the name and everything to do with the lack of technology. “This floor is filled with state-of-the-art servers. With that much computing power at our fingertips, we could digitize these files and cross-reference them a million different ways. It would be faster and better.”
Natalie held firm.
“The instructions were specific,” she replied. “Adam told us we could only use the manual typewriter that came with the room. So that’s what we’re going to do. Besides, there’s something to be said for using the processing power in our heads. By going through the information and analyzing it ourselves, we might find something that a computer would miss.”
Grayson gasped at the mere suggestion. “I’ll just pretend you didn’t say that.”
Despite these protests, everyone whose arm wasn’t in a cast took turns at the typewriter, and “The Whole Enchilada” began to take shape. An entry was typed for each one of the Unlucky 13. The first three were the easiest, because they were the ones we already knew were dead.