We Sled With Dragons

by C. Alexander London

  Oliver struggled to stay awake as he steered, leaning forward on the sled to rest his legs. Celia found her eyelids getting heavier and heavier too. With every cheerful bark of the dogs or crash of a distant ice floe, she snapped them open again, but it didn’t last. Her eyelids pressed down on the world.

  “Mush, mush,” she heard her brother call, not as loudly as before, almost a whisper, but the dogs kept moving, pressed forward by their own love of running on the open ice.

  They hardly need me at all, thought Oliver, watching through heavy eyelids as the dogs found their own way around a crack in the ice, pulling the sled safely to the other side of the narrow channel of water. “Good dogs,” he murmured. He leaned on the handlebars and closed his eyes. “Just for a second,” he told himself. “Just to rest for second.”

  On the sled, Celia was already sound asleep, and Oliver soon followed. Let it never be said of the Navel twins that there is a danger too great, or a condition too perilous, that they could not sleep through it.

  It was their good fortune to have a team of skillful sled dogs pulling them along who needed no more encouragement than the joy of running.

  It was their bad fortune, however, to still have a polar bear on their trail.

  The great beast moved slowly among the floes, stopping between boulders to sniff the air, swimming across narrow channels of water where the ice had broken, tracking them. With the scarcity of food this far north, it has been said that a hungry polar bear will sometimes track its prey for hundreds of miles across the ice.

  And this bear, we should note, was very hungry.

  23

  WE ARE NOT BRUNCH

  “YOU NEVER KNOW what you’ll learn when you watch TV,” said Claire Navel, as she and her husband watched the grainy black-and-white image on the security monitor. “Maybe Oliver and Celia are on to something.”

  Dr. Navel raised an eyebrow at her.

  “At least when it’s educational,” she added. “Like this.”

  She tapped the screen as a large double-rotor cargo helicopter landed on top of the research station. They saw the doors open and Sir Edmund step out, wearing a fluffy white snowsuit with a thick fur hood and oversized goggles. His big mustache gave him a walrusy look, and Claire Navel, in spite of the danger her family was in, had to chuckle.

  “I can’t believe he’s my mortal enemy,” she said.

  “Our mortal enemy,” corrected Dr. Navel.

  “Of course,” she said, absently rubbing the spot on her finger where her ring had been. She thought of her children, racing across the ice on a dogsled, and exhaled sharply. She wouldn’t let Sir Edmund and Janice get away with all they had put the twins through. They might be villainous, but their evil schemes were nothing compared to a mother’s wrath. They’d get their comeuppance.

  She smiled again. She really liked the word comeuppance.

  On the screen, Sir Edmund was shouting orders at the men who had arrived with him, and they started unloading a giant crate from the back of the big helicopter. It was at least twenty feet long. It took eight large men to carry it.

  Janice ran up the metal stairs to the landing pad to greet Sir Edmund, her eyes glancing briefly at the crate, snow blowing up into her face with the wind from the rotor blades. She shouted something to Sir Edmund. The Doctors Navel couldn’t hear what was being said, but by the way Janice was gesturing, it looked like she was explaining how she planned to do them in. She even laughed.

  Sir Edmund did not look amused.

  Janice seemed disappointed and did some more explaining. Sir Edmund gestured back.

  “I think they’re coming this way,” said Dr. Navel. “Sir Edmund wants to talk to us.”

  “How can you tell?” his wife asked.

  “Because that’s what he just said.” Dr. Navel shrugged. “I learned to read lips while you were away. It passed the time.”

  His wife hugged him; she was impressed.

  “I won’t ever go away like that again,” she promised. “Once Oliver and Celia are back, we’ll always stick together.”

  Dr. Navel smiled, although part of him didn’t believe it. He knew his wife was as much daredevil as parent, and sometimes the daredevil side of her won out. But he would always be there to put things back together when she returned.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked. “There could be a problem when they see that the twins have escaped.”

  “At least it will be our problem, not Oliver and Celia’s. They’re safer out on the ice than in here with those two.”

  She changed the channel to the hallway so they could see Janice and Sir Edmund coming, with the rest of his thugs for backup.

  “And it will be nice to see the look on Edmund’s face when he sees they’re gone,” she added.

  “But what if he goes after them?”

  “I’m sure he’ll go after them,” she said. “But he’ll have to get through us first.”

  • • •

  Sir Edmund stood outside the steel door and stared up at it.

  “So they’re on the other side of this door, huh?” he said.

  “That’s right,” Janice told him.

  He pulled at the door and tugged at the chains. “Seems strong,” he said.

  “It’s designed to keep polar bears out; I’m sure it will hold the Navels in.”

  “You’re sure, are you?” Sir Edmund stroked his mustache. The Navels had escaped his clutches more times than he could count. He did not want to underestimate them again. He had his own ideas on how to keep them contained. “There’s no other way out?”

  “No,” said Janice, starting to get offended that Sir Edmund didn’t trust her.

  “You’re sure?”

  Janice scowled at him. She did not appreciate her villainy being questioned. She had raided the tombs of the ancient kings of Burma to steal the Jade Toothpicks; she had stolen the identity of a famed Tibetan mountain climber; she had kidnapped more explorers than she could count. She could certainly keep the Navels prisoner!

  “I’ve brought you closer to Atlantis than you’ve ever been, and you doubt me?” she crossed her arms.

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Sir Edmund. “I guess I have no further need of your services.”

  “So that’s it? I’m done?”

  “You are,” said Sir Edmund.

  “Then I want my money.”

  “You will be generously paid for your work.” Sir Edmund smiled. “I trust bars of gold will be acceptable to you?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “they will.” She tried to suppress her smile. It did not suit a grave robber to giggle like a schoolgirl.

  “Good,” said Sir Edmund. “I’ve had my men unload it into the upper cargo bay. You can get it there.”

  He was barely done speaking when Janice rushed up the tunnel toward the cargo bay.

  “You’ll need the combination to unlock it,” he called after her.

  “I’ll pick the lock!” she called back, not breaking her stride. She wasn’t about to turn around and give Sir Edmund a chance to trick her out of the gold she’d been promised. She wasn’t going to do anything else until she saw the gold with her own eyes.

  Once she was out of Sir Edmund’s sight, she skipped down the tunnel. Her partner Frank had been fed to a yeti, her next partner, Ernest, had just been thrown in jail in Djibouti with that pirate, Bonnie. Janice was the only one left, which suited her fine. When it came to gold, she didn’t like to share.

  “Nice knowing you,” Sir Edmund whispered, a devious little smirk spreading across his devious little face. He ran his fingers along the giant fossil in the wall. And exhaled, content.

  • • •

  On the other side of the door, Dr. Navel’s eyes were glued to the security monitor, watching Janice and Sir Edmund talk. They were turned away from the camera so he couldn’
t read their lips, but he watched Janice run off. He kept having to wipe the screen off as water dripped down from the ceiling.

  The whole roof of the room was sagging inward with the weight of water above it. The ice was melting, and soon the weight of the earth pressing down would cause a collapse. It was amazing the disasters that a few extra degrees of warmth could cause in the Arctic Circle.

  “We had better hurry,” he said.

  “Just a few more minutes,” said his wife, stepping up behind him. “I want to see what made Janice run off so quickly. See if you can find her.”

  Dr. Navel pressed a button on the remote and the screen changed to a picture of the empty kennel with the gate swinging open. He hit it again and just saw static.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Oliver and Celia are better at this sort of thing.”

  After some more fiddling they saw the helicopter already crusted with ice, and then the large cargo bay with the one long crate sitting in the middle of the floor. Janice came rushing over to it.

  “Got it!” said Dr. Navel.

  “What do you think is in that crate?” his wife whispered.

  “I thought that’s why we’re watching,” said Dr. Navel. “To find out.”

  “It was a rhetorical question,” she replied. “I didn’t expect you to answer.”

  They watched as Janice bent down and fiddled with the lock on the crate.

  “She’s picking the lock,” said Dr. Navel.

  “You don’t need to narrate, honey,” said Claire. “I’m watching too.”

  Janice stood again. She smiled and lifted the lid of the crate. From the angle, the explorers couldn’t see into it, but they watched her face as the smile vanished. Her eyebrows furrowed with confusion. Then her face turned into a mask of terror. Her mouth opened wide, and even through the thick ice and the steel doors they heard her muffled scream just before something pulled her into the crate and she was gone.

  “Um,” was all that Dr. Navel could think to say.

  They watched in horror as the large crate shook and rattled on the floor. They saw Janice’s hands reach out, trying to pull herself free, but just as her head came into view again, whatever was inside the crate pulled her back in. The crate stopped shaking. The cargo bay was still.

  “What was that?” said Dr. Navel, stepping away from the screen, as if the thing in the box could come through the security camera to get him. “What is in that box?”

  “It could be anything,” said Claire. “Sir Edmund’s private zoo is filled with rare, exotic, and dangerous creatures.”

  “Well, I am the world’s leading cryptozoologist, after all,” Sir Edmund said, stepping into the room. The Navels spun around. They hadn’t even heard him unlock the chains and open the door, but now he stood before them stroking his big red mustache, with two of his thugs behind him.

  “You’re no more than a poacher,” said Dr. Navel. “You steal these creatures from their homes and put them in cages. You once set a yeti on Oliver and Celia!”

  “And a kraken,” added his wife.

  “Oh yes, that was delightful,” said Sir Edmund. “But nothing compared to what I’ve brought this time! It took quite some doing to capture it.”

  “I think I know what it is,” said Claire.

  “You do?” asked Sir Edmund.

  “You do?” asked Dr. Navel.

  “I do,” she said. “And you’re crazy. If that thing gets out, it is impossible to control. It could eat you too.”

  “What is it?” Dr. Navel asked.

  “Do you want to tell him, or should I?” Sir Edmund asked her. “I mean, I can’t believe he hasn’t figured it out . . . there’s a fossil of one frozen in the wall on the other side of the door.”

  “You mean—” Dr. Navel gulped.

  “Yeah,” sighed Claire. “Sir Edmund just fed Janice to a dragon for lunch.”

  “Is it really lunchtime already?” Sir Edmund checked his watch. “I think I would say she was more like brunch.”

  “Dragons don’t eat brunch,” said Claire Navel.

  “I believe I’m the expert here,” said Sir Edmund. “The dragon is from my zoo, after all, and I say Janice was brunch.”

  “A person can’t be brunch,” said Claire.

  “To a dragon she can,” said Sir Edmund.

  “You need breakfast and lunch food together for it to be brunch.”

  “You do not.”

  “At least coffee or juice.”

  “Dragons don’t drink coffee or juice.”

  “Then Janice wasn’t brunch.”

  “She was.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “She was!”

  “She wasn’t!” Claire Navel stomped her foot. “A dragon does not eat brunch!”

  “A dragon eats whatever a dragon wants!” Sir Edmund’s face got red.

  Dr. Navel grabbed his wife’s hand. He couldn’t believe she was arguing about this. She nodded at him that it was okay. She knew what she was doing.

  Sir Edmund’s eyes narrowed. He knew what she was doing too. She was trying to distract him. He bent down and looked under the table. He peered behind a filing cabinet.

  “Where are your brats?” he asked, then he saw the open grate to the air-conditioning vent. “No,” he said, his face turning a brighter red than his facial hair. “No!”

  He turned to his thugs and barked at them. “Search the station. Search the ice! Find Oliver and Celia and bring them back here! Find them now!” He looked back at their parents. “You’ll regret this,” he said and stormed out of the room. “Lunch, dinner, a midnight snack . . . whatever it is, I promise I will feed the lot of you to that dragon!”

  “As long as it isn’t brunch!” Claire Navel shouted after him defiantly as the doors slammed. They heard the chains snapping back into place. The Navels glanced nervously at each other.

  Claire Navel smiled. “I bought us a little time,” she said. “And now Sir Edmund’s mad. No one thinks clearly when he’s mad.”

  “You have a plan?” Dr. Navel pursed his lips.

  His wife nodded.

  “We’re breaking out?”

  She nodded again.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I was thinking of calling it the Polar Plot.”

  “Not a bad name,” said Dr. Navel. “How do we do it?”

  “That’s the part you’re not going to like so much.”

  Dr. Navel listened to his wife’s plan and reluctantly agreed. If it worked, they would escape, find Oliver and Celia, and discover Atlantis together. If it failed, the twins would never see their parents again.

  24

  WE SLEEP WITH WALRUSES

  IT CAME AS quite a shock to Oliver and Celia when they woke up, lurching to a stop at the edge of a wide crack in the ice at least as long as a football field. It came as even more of a shock that they were surrounded by a herd of walruses, hundreds of them, snoring and growling and trumpeting at each other in what Wally the Word Worm would call a cacophony, and the rest of us would simply call loud.

  Oliver, still leaning on the handlebars, stuck to them by his frozen gloves, snapped his eyes open to find himself face to face with a large bull walrus. Its whiskers tickled his cheeks and its large tusks pointed down past his knees. It had a huge scar down the left side of its face that made it look like a grizzled veteran of long ago battles.

  The walrus snorted once and Oliver fell backward off the sled and into the snow.

  Celia chuckled and the scar-faced walrus turned toward her, lifting its bulky body up to tower over her. Celia, as we know, was not someone who would allow herself to be bullied by an animal, even if it weighed over a hundred times more than she did and had two hard ivory tusks threatening to impale her. She’d faced down a giant squid before. She could handle a walrus.

 
She pulled up her goggles, stood up as straight as she could underneath the walrus and puffed out her chest. She glared. The walrus reared back farther, its tusks hanging perilously above Celia’s head.

  The walrus roared.

  Celia roared right back.

  The walrus snorted once and turned to the side. It flopped onto its belly and moved away down the ice, grunted and growling. The other walruses, seeing that this strange little creature had stared down their leader, also moved away, clearing a nice spot on the ice for the Navel twins and their sled dogs.

  Celia nodded, happy that she had established her dominance. The walrus wasn’t so different than Oliver first thing in the morning.

  “Well, now what?” said Oliver, looking over the herd of walruses to the ocean beyond.

  The nearest ice was floating at least a hundred yards away across freezing-cold water.

  “How would I know?” said Celia. “Why don’t you check the compass?”

  Oliver looked at his feet.

  Celia’s shoulders slumped. “You lost it, didn’t you?” She frowned.

  Oliver shrugged. “Kind of.”

  “How do you kind of lose it? You either lost it or you didn’t!”

  “I lost it.”

  “I knew it!”

  “If you knew it,” said Oliver, “then why did you give it to me in the first place?”

  That one stumped Celia. Either she didn’t know he’d lose it or she did know and she gave it to him anyway. She didn’t want to admit to being wrong either way, so she ignored him and looked at the sky.

  “We need to get across the water,” she said. “That way is north.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s getting dark,” said Celia. “And that’s the North Star.” She pointed at a bright spot in the sky.

  “How can you tell? I can see more than one star.”

  “Episode 237 of Love at 30,000 Feet,” said Celia. “Captain Sinclair falls in love with an astronomer who turns out to be a figment of his imagination, but she tells him how to navigate by the finding the star just off the end of the Little Dipper constellation. It’s always right above the North Pole. And that’s where we need to go.”