Masters of Disaster

by Gary Paulsen

  He climbed out of the Dumpster, dragging his bucket and backpack behind him. He waved goodbye to the rhino-rat, slammed the cover on the Dumpster and sat down to wait for Henry. He pretended not to hear the sudden increase in noise inside the Dumpster. He imagined that microscopic crawly things were slithering all over his skin under the plastic wrap. Maybe I’ve got the plague, he thought, or parasites or lice or rhino-rat cooties.

  Henry finally showed up with neat paper bags full of tidily folded newspapers and empty soda cans. Henry padded silently, while Reed squished and sloshed with every step, through the darkened school hallways to the science labs.

  Riley had flipped on a computer and pulled up the rough draft of the paper he’d started working on that afternoon in study hall. He was surrounded by open textbooks and pages of handwritten notes and had a second and a third computer logged on to different search sites. He zoomed between the computers on a wheeled desk chair.

  Henry set his bags on a lab table and started to sort through them. He pulled out newspapers and magazines and clucked disapprovingly when he found a plastic pudding cup from the faculty lounge.

  Reed dragged his bags of specimens to a table in the corner and started undressing. He threw the poncho and waders and scuba mask and painting mask and rubber gloves and miles of plastic wrap that he unwound from his body into the hazardous-materials disposal bin at the back of the room.

  Once Reed was stripped down to his bottom layer of regular clothes, which he noted were miraculously clean and dry and stench-free, and had assured himself that nothing tiny, alive and dangerous was crawling around on him, he stepped over to the table where his specimens were and, with a sense of confidence he didn’t usually feel, started to pry the lid off the bucket.

  “We need—” Henry was going to say more, but he couldn’t. Because, as Riley later wrote in his follow-up report, someone had left a Bunsen burner ever so slightly on after last-period science class, and the accumulated methane in the sealed bucket of shimmering, slimy, sludgy, not-quite-solid, not-quite-liquid, spongy semiorganic material that Reed had collected, ignited.

  The contents of the bucket exploded upward, and the force of the blast carried Reed across the science lab, out into the hall and into a locker.

  Except for a wave of glistening slime that stretched from the science table to the hallway, the lab wasn’t damaged.

  “I’m okay.” Reed’s voice echoed from the depths of the locker. “I’m wedged pretty tight, but nothing hurts and I’m not bleeding. Good thing we did this after school when no one was around, because we could have gotten in some serious trouble.”

  The contents of the bucket, now completely liquefied from the chemical reaction, dripped down the sides of the locker, drenching Reed but, as Henry later pointed out, making him slippery enough to pop right out of the tight space without even dislocating his shoulders or hips.

  Other than some small paper cuts on his fingers, Henry was fine. Riley wasn’t hurt except for a slight strain in his right ankle from zooming his desk chair into the hall to check on Reed.

  “I reek of decomposition and fetid rot,” Reed said sadly. “Remember the good old days when I just smelled baby doody with every breath and had the constant taste of river pee in my mouth?”

  “Yeah, those were good times,” Riley said absently as he jammed a flash drive into a computer and started adding to the report details about the minor explosion, eye-watering stench, shimmering wave of gunk and subsequent removal of Reed from the locker.

  “I think, men,” Henry said, “that this may be our finest hour. Reed, I’m sure I speak for Riley when I say: Another exceptional job on your part. Thanks for taking the lead on the heavy-lifting part of the experiment. You were great.” Reed smiled and ducked his head modestly. “I read the directions carefully,” Henry went on, “and there was nothing about the experiment being a success; we were only supposed to think of one, execute it and write it up. We’re three for three. Even if it’s going to take us all night and every paper towel in the building to clean up the mess.”

  “Henry?” Reed said. “I don’t want to worry anyone or sound like I’m whacked out or anything—but didn’t it seem to you that the sludge we collected was alive somehow? I mean, it slithered when I tried to catch it and then it threw me across the building. Maybe whatever that was didn’t want to be the subject of our experiment.”

  “We just won’t mention that in our scholarship application,” Henry decided. “No sense compromising the fine scientific research we’ve accomplished with superstitious fear that the discovery of a new life-form could raise. Besides, the blast probably killed it. All in all, a huge leap forward for the scientific method. I’m pretty sure this is how Galileo must have felt.”

  “Or Dr. Frankenstein,” Reed said, still sure the sludge had moved away from him.

  5

  The Headless, Blood-Drinking, Flesh-Eating Corpses of Cleveland

  “This time,” Henry said, “I’ve come up with something really unusual.” He was eating pizza with Reed and Riley in his backyard on a Saturday afternoon.

  “Wait!” Reed said. “Do you think it’s time for us to do another project when I still stink from the last three? I have to sleep in the basement and shower in the washtub in the laundry room because my mother says my smell is getting in her curtains and carpeting. I’m not supposed to do anything else interesting until the odor from the last three interesting things we’ve done stops seeping into her walls. I don’t even know what this means, but she says I’m bringing down the value of the house and diminishing the equity my parents have built over the years because of how awful I smell.”

  “Uh-huh.” Henry was nodding but not really listening.

  “And I have to sit by an open window in every class and I can’t eat lunch in the cafeteria anymore because the funk that surrounds me makes people sick to their stomachs. The only good thing is that Dwight keeps his distance, which, when you stop to think about it, is almost worth smelling baby doody all the time and constantly tasting river pee and always stinking like sludge.”

  “Mystery,” Henry announced, ignoring Reed. “I am talking about mystery. We do not have enough mystery in our lives, men. We don’t have any mystery in our lives. Let’s change that.”

  “I think maybe Reed has a point, Henry,” Riley said. “Your ideas have a weird way of making him smell really bad. And it’s getting harder and harder to always keep downwind of him. Which reminds me: Reed, could you move 3.7 inches to your left? Because the wind has shifted slightly and I’m catching a whiff.”

  “This is different.” Henry paused as he watched Reed shift over on the picnic table bench. “It’s not a dangerous or smelly project. This time we’re going to solve a mystery. We’ll just be using our brains.”

  “I’m up for anything pain-free. And stench-free. Solving a mystery doesn’t sound like it could hurt or smell,” Reed said hopefully.

  “We’re going to solve a murder mystery that’s over a hundred years old. When I was in the public library doing a social studies report, I found an old journal by a guy who lived in Cleveland in the nineteenth century. Turns out that the Hansen family, who lived out on the east edge of town, disappeared on May 8, 1887.”

  “What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” Riley asked, jotting “5/8/1887—family gone” in a small notebook he pulled from his pocket.

  “On May seventh the whole family was seen sitting on the porch, waving at a neighbor on his way to town. But on May eighth, they were gone—the man, his wife, their fourteen-year-old daughter and even the dog. The house was completely empty.”

  “No one knows what happened?”

  “Nope. The local lawmen investigated—searched the house and grounds, asked the neighbors, talked to townsfolk, but no trace of them was ever found. No one ever heard from them again.”

  “And we’re going to find them?” Reed asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Now, over a hundred years later?”

>   “Yup.”

  “How’s that going to work?”

  “I have inside information they didn’t have back then,” Henry said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “A note saying where the bodies were hidden.”

  “Bodies?” Reed drummed his fingers nervously on the tabletop. “Notes about bodies are never good. Hardly anything good ever comes from talking about bodies. We’re getting back to the dangerous thing again, Henry. Next you’ll be talking about worms. Worms that eat bodies and smell like decomposition and rot.”

  Henry pulled an old leather-bound volume from his backpack and held it up.

  “‘Darryl Dawson,’” Riley read from the cover. “‘A Life Book.’”

  “Dawson was a Clevelander whose descendants donated his journals to the library because he had so diligently recorded what he heard and saw each day,” Henry said. “But it wasn’t the journal that was interesting as much as the note I found inside.” Henry thumbed through the pages of his yellow legal pad until he located a loose piece of paper. “Here, read this.”

  Reed took it. “It’s torn and the letters are smudgy and most of the page is missing.” Riley leaned in to see.

  “Read what’s there.”

  “… Bodies too difficult to bury … deposited in an old powder cavern …” Riley stopped. “How do you know this has anything to do with the missing family?”

  “Read the date at the top of the page. What does it say?”

  “May 7, 1887.”

  “And look at this, the clincher,” Henry said. “Where they say they hid the bodies. An old powder cavern, right?”

  Reed shifted nervously. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “I read an article about it. During the Civil War, the Northern army had a storage depot here in Cleveland—a small cave at the riverbank that was excavated in order to store gunpowder. The headquarters for the supply depot where the army officers and clerks worked was the building that later became the Hansen house.”

  “So?”

  “The cavern was expanded to run right under the headquarters building so that the army had access to the gunpowder supplies from the headquarters. After the war, the cavern was shut down and abandoned and the tunnel that connected the building to the cavern was sealed off, and pretty much everybody forgot about it. Everybody, that is, except the killers of the Hansen family, because that’s where they put the bodies.”

  Reed stared at him. “You’re crazy, you know that, Henry? Stark nuts.”

  “But you’re coming with me tonight, right?”

  “Where?”

  “To the old Hansen house—that old stone building past the highway.”

  “That place is supposed to be haunted!”

  “We’re not going to disturb any ghosts,” Henry said. “We’re just going to be looking for the bodies of a murdered family.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Reed said.

  “Absolutely. We owe it to the victims, men, to solve at least part of the mystery of their murders. We have to”—Henry dropped his voice reverently—“Give Peace to the Dead and Allow Them to Rest. It’s Our Duty.”

  “How are we going to find the tunnel?” Riley asked.

  “I dug around at the library and copied an old army drawing of the hidden entrance to the tunnel in the house. It’s behind a wall in the basement, then you go down a ladder.” Henry pulled a scribbled map out of his pocket.

  “I don’t know, Henry, this sounds kind of crazy. What do you think, Riley?”

  “I want to see what happens. I’m in.”

  “Perfect,” Henry said. “I knew you guys would love this idea.”

  “I’m not going anywhere alone, I’m not doing anything dangerous and I am not going near anything that stinks,” Reed said.

  “Of course not,” Henry said. “We’ll be as safe as if we stayed home. We’re all sticking together and doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “When you put it that way, it does sound like a good plan,” Reed said. “Very cool.”

  Riley wrote down “safe” and then a question mark in his notebook, but he didn’t say anything.

  A few hours later they were outside the Hansen house, which stood on an untended, brushy lot. They were running out of excuses to give their parents for breaking curfew, so each of them had climbed out his bedroom window.

  The sky was black with storm clouds, and drops of rain were beginning to fall. The front door of the house was gone and half the front wall was caved in.

  “Take these,” Riley said, digging into his backpack. “I brought Night Commander flashlights.” He also pulled out a book about paranormal activity, because brushing up on ghost protocol and etiquette seemed like a good idea prior to entering a bone-laden storage tunnel underneath a haunted house. Riley believed in being prepared for any eventuality.

  “Now,” Henry said, “according to the drawings I studied, there’s a stairway just inside the front door leading to the basement. At the bottom of the steps, we head to the right, to the sealed-in space behind a wall that leads farther down, to the old cavern underneath the house where the bodies are located.”

  “Tell me again,” Reed said, “why we didn’t just call the police and let them know about the bodies you think we’re going to find?”

  “Because then we wouldn’t get any credit for breaking the case,” Henry said. “And it’s not solving the mystery if you just help the police. We have to do it ourselves. Or it doesn’t count and it’s not a real adventure. Now come on.”

  Since there was no front door, they climbed over the threshold and, a few tentative feet later, found themselves at the top of the stairway to the basement, which was missing more risers than it still had. The ones that still clung between the wall and the disintegrating railing looked wobbly. Henry put his foot on the partially rotted wood of the first step gingerly. “This way … easy now.”

  The instant all three boys were on the stairs, the old square-cut nails that held the stairway together gave out and what was left of the stairs collapsed. As Riley later wrote in his report, gravity being what it was, the boys dropped like stones to the basement floor, where they expressed their sudden stop in terms of high G-loads that quadrupled their effective weight and brought the load to an instantaneous 0.7 tons—after which the rotting basement floor also gave way. They plunged into the cavern below as if they’d been shot through a cannon.

  They came to rest in front of a pile of old bones that stood nearly eight feet tall and seven feet wide, gleaming white, horribly white, in the glare of their Night Commander flashlights.

  “We found the bodies, men,” Henry said.

  “That’s a whole lot of bones,” Reed said.

  “How big was the family, again?” Riley asked. “Because this seems like more than a husband and wife and daughter and dog. Even if it was a large dog. Even if it was a doggysaurus.”

  “Oh, man,” Reed said, “this is just like that zombie movie about the headless, blood-drinking, flesh-eating corpses. There was a stairway in an old deserted house, just like this, that led down into a pit, just like this, where the zombies kept the bones of their victims after they had drained all the blood and eaten all the flesh. Just. Like. This.”

  For a few seconds, they stood silently, Riley trying to count the bones for inclusion in his report, Henry peering past the bone pile, hoping there were other discoveries to be made, and Reed trying to remember what had happened to the people from the zombie movie who found the bodies that the headless, blood-drinking, flesh-eating corpses had eaten, when they heard … eee ah, eee ah, eee ah, faintly from the depths of the tunnel that led out of the cavern.

  “That’s exactly the sound,” Reed breathed, “that the headless, blood-drinking, flesh-eating corpses made as they zeroed in on their victims.”

  “Don’t be sil—” Henry started to say, but he was cut off by the sudden flapping of hundreds of dark wings that filled the pit
where they stood.

  “Bats, it’s bats, they’re bats, bats are flying at my head!” Reed screamed. “Call 9-1-1! Bats carry rabies and I’m afraid of giant needles being stuck in my belly if I get rabies!” He dropped his Night Commander flashlight and started blindly running away from the bats, which had been disturbed by the boys’ noise and flashlights. Henry and Reed ducked and doused their lights but remained still and relatively calm.

  Reed’s shrieks bounced off the walls of the tunnel, matching the impact of his body. Blind and terrified in the sudden pitch dark, Reed ran deeper and deeper into the tunnel and slipped on the suddenly gooey, slick floor, cartwheeling off the sides of the tunnel before landing in a soft, wet pile that smelled like ammonia and decaying flesh.

  “I found the zombie poop,” he called. “I can’t see because the smell is making my eyes water, but I’m okay. I can’t hear because my ears are packed full and I’m pretty sure it’s leaching into my brain cavity, but I’m okay. And it’s burning my scalp and it feels like my hair is falling out in clumps, but I’m okay. Can you guys, uh, come find me and help me out? Because I don’t mean to worry anyone or complain, but even though I’m okay, I’m afraid to move right now.”

  “It’s like he has a gift,” Henry said to Riley as they flipped on their flashlights and made their way down the tunnel toward Reed’s voice. “No matter where we go or what we do, he’s like a compass pointing north when it comes to locating smelly goo.”

  “Extraordinary,” Riley agreed. “You work so hard to come up with these adventures and somehow it always comes down to Reed in a pile of poop.”