Masterminds

by Gordon Korman

  “Be grateful,” Eli grunts. “We could be seeing lots of people—in purple suits.”

  I’m sweating like crazy, but that’s a sign that, so far, I’m still okay. I heard once that it’s when you stop sweating that you know the dehydration is getting really bad.

  “It’s so hot!” Tori exclaims.

  “No hotter than Happy Valley,” I point out.

  “Yeah, but there, you’re never far from air-conditioning or a pool,” Amber complains.

  I wish I had my pool right now. I’d drink it, chlorine and all.

  “I give our parents credit for one thing,” I offer. “They kept us pampered while we were under their microscope.”

  “I’ll take this over all their toys and comforts,” Eli says through gritted teeth. “At least I’m nobody’s lab rat.”

  I’m down with that, but a nervous thought has begun to nag at me. We haven’t seen anything in almost an entire day. People die from being stranded in places like this without food or water. When do we reach the point where being free is less important than not dying?

  I know the others are thinking it, too, although nobody says it aloud. We’re all dragging. Sunburn stings our faces and the backs of our necks. We’re not going to get a second wind without at least water. We pass a couple of dried-up ponds, and something that might have once been a creek bed. That’s about it. I guess we’ve picked the wrong time of year for a hike. There isn’t so much as a green weed to chew for its moisture.

  With the sun still high and blazing, Amber hits the dirt. She doesn’t even make a sound; she just wafts to the ground like a slip of paper floating down on an air current.

  “We’ve got to stop,” Tori pleads through cracked lips. “Find some shade and lie low until it’s not so hot.”

  “We can’t afford the time,” Eli argues. “When the Purple People Eaters come after us, we have to be long gone!”

  Tori is on her knees. “Amber—wake up!”

  Amber is annoyed. “I am up. I didn’t pass out; I tripped.”

  We look down and that’s when we see it—two steel rails on a bed of wooden ties, half buried in dust and weeds.

  The train tracks.

  We wait forever, but at least we’re not walking anymore. I’m pretty sure the track is still in regular use, because the top of the rail is shiny. Still, it’s a long, nervous vigil. And the thirst—that’s with us every second now. It’s like a living thing inside me, a parched sand creature, expanding in size, and royally ticked off.

  I pass the time picturing a bottle of water. Seriously, that’s four hours of my life—doing nothing but that.

  We notice the vibration first. It’s going on for several minutes before we actually hear the train. At last, just as dusk is beginning to settle in, the locomotive appears on the horizon, coming from the west, out of the sunset.

  “Why’s it going so slow?” Amber wonders.

  “It’s a freight train,” Eli tells her. “And don’t complain. We’re going to have to jump onto it.”

  “Why can’t we just flag it down?” I ask.

  “Because then we’d have to explain who we are and what we’re doing here,” Eli reasons. “If they start calling around to police stations, asking about runaway kids, the Purples might find out about it.”

  We retreat from the track and crouch in the brush, sizing up the task ahead of us. One piece of good news—the train is pulling a zillion cars, so we’re going to have a very wide selection.

  We flatten ourselves to the ground as the engines pass. Once those are out of sight, we approach the track and look for a way in. The liquid tankers are sealed, and the grain hoppers are only accessible from the top.

  I point to a flat car stacked with lumber. “One of those?”

  Tori shakes her head. “No good. The Purple People Eaters could spot us from their helicopter.”

  And then a boxcar comes lumbering along, its sliding door open wide. We can see some cargo piled inside, but there’s plenty of room.

  We look at each other and nod all around. That’s the one.

  The train may be slow, but when it comes to boarding a moving boxcar, slow is a relative term. We’re weak, exhausted, and dehydrated, thanks to twenty-four hours wandering in the wilderness.

  There’s a long metal step the length of the door opening. Eli hops up on it, but the motion of the train throws off his precarious balance, and he has to jump down again. Amber gets one wobbly foot on it before tumbling back into the dirt. Tori bypasses the step altogether and hurls herself inside. She makes it, but not without whacking one knee on her way in. Now she’s pulling away, and the three of us are running beside the track to keep up with her.

  “Come on!” she wails. I see where she’s coming from. The thought of being the only one aboard must be almost as scary as missing the train.

  Amber gets there first. Tori reaches out and hauls her aboard. Eli clamps his hands on the side of the doorframe and tries to swing himself inside, but he doesn’t have the guts to let go. So he’s hanging there at a weird angle, blocking the opening, legs kicking.

  “Get inside, stupid!” I pant, running along beside the tracks.

  “I can’t!”

  It’s like a scene from a comedy. It would probably be hilarious if our whole lives didn’t depend on getting in there.

  I give Eli’s dangling butt a gigantic push and he goes flying into the car. My toe strikes the edge of a railroad tie, and I start to stumble. I know in my heart, if I fall down, I’ll never catch up with the others. My stomach twists at the idea of being left behind.

  At the last second, I manage to right myself, hop, skip, and fling my entire body in through the opening.

  “Oof!” I hit the floor and roll. I have an awful thought—what if I keep rolling clear out the door on the other side?

  Luckily, though, I smack into a heavy pallet of cargo. Something inside gurgles.

  I put my fist through the side of the nearest carton and draw out a bottle of blue liquid. I stare at the label. I gawk.

  Gatorade!

  For the first time in what seems like forever, I smile, and show it to the others.

  “Anybody thirsty?”

  27

  ELI FRIEDEN

  We have no idea where we’re going.

  None of us expected to be huddled against crates of Gatorade in a rattling boxcar, so we never bothered to research railway routes or schedules. If things went according to plan, we’d be tooling east in Dad’s Lexus. Correction: Felix Hammerstrom’s Lexus. He isn’t my father anymore. Technically, he never was, any more than the United States was created at a real tea party. He thought he could hide the idea of rebellion from us, and in the end, he got more rebellion than he knew what to do with. Despite the whole-body throb of my wounds, the exhaustion of twenty-four hours on the run, the numbing lack of sleep, the ravenous hunger, and the paralyzing fear over what might lie ahead, I feel a deep satisfaction for that. Project Osiris is officially over.

  “Is it?” Amber’s not quite so sure. “The whole point of Osiris was to raise us in an ideal environment. Maybe we just lived up to everything our parents expected us to turn into in the first place—the criminal masterminds we’re cloned from.”

  “Masterminds—that’s us all right,” Malik snorts. “Nobody who saw us getting on the train would accuse us of having any minds at all. Not to mention we screwed up our escape so badly we almost got ourselves killed. And”—his voice drops in volume—“we did get one of us killed.”

  He reaches for a bottle of Gatorade, but we can see the desolation in his frantic gulping.

  “Malik,” Tori says gently, “we can’t know for sure that Hector didn’t make it.”

  He shakes his head despairingly. “Even if he was with us, we never could have gotten him on the train. He would have wimped out, just like he wimped out of jumping off the truck. It’s too bad he won’t be around to see us march into Happy Valley with an army of cops!”

  Some of the color
returns to Amber’s pale cheeks. “I’m all for that.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I put in quickly. “We’ve got a story to tell, but we’d better be really careful who we tell it to—if we can tell it to anybody at all.”

  “But we can’t do nothing,” Tori protests. “We owe it to the other clones who are still in Serenity.”

  “We’ll get to that,” I promise, “but only when we understand how things work in the real world. Remember, we’re clones, and we don’t know how that will go over. We’re also exact copies of some of the worst criminals in history—younger, but identical. Just because we don’t recognize who we’re cloned from doesn’t mean other people won’t.”

  “We thought we’d have a car,” Amber points out. “Without one, we’re hiding and hopping trains. We’ll never learn enough about the world to figure out how to fit into it.”

  I pull over a case of bottles and sit down, facing them. “Our best hope is Randy. He knows the outside world but he also knows what it’s like to be from Serenity.”

  “What makes you think we can find him?” Tori asks.

  “He’s at McNally Academy, outside Pueblo, Colorado. He can give us a place to lie low while we figure out how the world will look at us. It’s a boarding school, so we can blend in—no nosy questions about four kids being on their own.”

  Malik speaks up. “Randy’s parents are Osiris researchers. How can we be sure he won’t call them and rat us out?”

  That’s an easy one. “Randy’s my best friend,” I say with confidence. “He’d never stab me in the back. He’ll help us if he can.”

  I thought I’d never want to walk again, but after a few hours in the boxcar, I’d give anything to stretch my legs. It’s the middle of the night now, and we still haven’t come to a single town. I’m conjuring a murky vision of the map I saw that time on the plastics factory’s internet. I remember that the rail line splits in the eastern part of New Mexico. One branch continues east; the other curls north into Colorado. That’s the one we need if we want to end up somewhere near Pueblo. But we won’t know which route we’ve taken until we stop at a station. It’s one more variable to sweat over—as if we need another reason to sweat in a hot boxcar.

  Malik pulls a fresh case of Gatorade off the pallet, tears it open, and tosses a bottle to each of us. I make no move to catch it, and the container bounces painfully off my face, rolling along the floor of the car. The others share a laugh at my expense, but I barely notice. I’m staring at a sheet of newsprint sticking out of the skid at the base of the pallet. It’s from a paper called the San Bernardino Sun, and the banner headline blazons:

  BARTHOLOMEW GLEN DENIED PAROLE

  Something is ringing a bell in my head. But why? I’ve never heard of this guy. How could I? News stories about crime are never allowed to reach kids in Serenity. It’s the town’s primary mission.

  I snatch up the page and begin to read:

  Bartholomew Glen, the notorious Crossword Killer, was denied his first petition for parole yesterday. The brilliant but twisted Glen is currently serving nine consecutive life sentences for nine grisly murders. The nickname “Crossword Killer” comes from his habit of taunting the police with clues to his hideous crimes in the form of extremely difficult crossword puzzles. . . .

  And then some of the letters in the headline kind of fade out, and I see it as clearly as if it’s projected on the wall of the boxcar.

  BARTHOLOMEWGLEN

  ARTHOMWGEN

  The shock is so total, so horrific, that it’s a few moments before I can explain to the others that it’s not a direct hit with a Gatorade bottle that has me pale and shaking.

  This is the mysterious name on that paper we photographed on the conference table in the factory!

  There is only one reason why the name of the Crossword Killer could appear on a document in the very nerve center of Project Osiris: He was one of the criminal masterminds who served as DNA donors for our experiment.

  One of us is cloned from Bartholomew Glen.

  Our devastation is total. Sure, we knew we were cloned from bad people. But since we never had a name before, I guess we all pictured a cartoonish figure in jail somewhere, maybe even wearing a striped suit. In this vision, the guy—or girl—was a lawbreaker, yes, but also sort of harmless because how much harm can you do from prison?

  Bartholomew Glen isn’t harmless. He’s a psychotic killer with nine innocent people on his conscience. And one of us is an exact copy of him, right down to the last cell.

  We pass the paper around, reading and rereading the details of Glen’s horrible crimes. We don’t want to know, yet somehow, we can’t resist.

  “When I picture a criminal mastermind,” Tori ventures, “it’s always a little, you know, romantic. Like an intricately planned scheme to break into the Louvre and steal the Mona Lisa. But Bartholomew Glen is just—sick.”

  “Don’t worry,” Malik says bitterly. “It can’t be either of you. You have to be cloned from his identical twin sister, Bartholomia, the puppy crusher.”

  “It’s not funny, Malik!” Amber exclaims.

  “Who’s laughing?” Malik retorts. “He’s probably me. Toxic element, remember?”

  It’s a destructive way to think, but now that the cat is out of the bag, we might as well get it out in the open. “There are eleven of us—seven boys and four girls. Bartholomew Glen could be any of the seven. He could even be—” I clam up. It’s not going to improve anyone’s mood to remember Hector.

  “No, not Hector.” Malik is adamant. “Hector was a good kid.”

  “And anyway,” I add, “whoever it is didn’t kill anybody. This Glen guy did. We have to get used to the idea that we might find out we’re cloned from some pretty awful criminals.”

  We lapse into a melancholy silence, listening to the endless rumble of the train. Amber is the first of us to doze off, a Gatorade bottle clutched in her arms like a newborn baby. Malik is next, falling into troubled dreams. Tori’s eyes are closed, but I think she’s still awake. Me? No way. Just the idea of Bartholomew Glen and his nine victims is enough to ensure that I may never lay my head down again. I remember Malik’s words when I called off the search for Hector—“At least I’m not stone cold like you.”

  Stone cold—if ever there was an expression to describe the Crossword Killer, that’s it.

  Do I have the strongest reaction to Bartholomew Glen because I’m him?

  That turns out to be my last waking thought.

  “Eli!”

  The voice reaches me through turbulent dreams—exploding trucks lighting up the night; Hector Amani, gone; enemies in purple; Felix Hammerstrom chasing me in his Lexus, the front bumper nudging the backs of my knees as I run for my life. And then I’m down, the weight of the speeding car crunching me like an insect—

  “Eli—wake up!”

  It’s Tori, leaning over and shaking my shoulder. The situation comes hurtling back—the escape, the train, the lifesaving Gatorade. Malik and Amber are just rousing from sleep. The train—never very fast—is slowing down. It’s just after dawn, the sun still low in the sky. Through the open door of the boxcar, we can see signs of civilization—buildings, houses, power lines, roads.

  “Is this a city?” Amber whispers.

  “I don’t think so,” Malik replies. “But it’s bigger than anything we’re used to. Crummier too.”

  He’s right. Some of the houses along the tracks are really ramshackle, and the fencing is torn and rusty. In Serenity, nothing is ever allowed to stay broken or even unpainted. That doesn’t seem to be the case out here.

  We roll past a faded sign: Colorado City.

  “Colorado!” I breathe, encouraged that we’ve come north. I have no clue where Pueblo is, but at least we’re not heading east, away from McNally Academy and Randy.

  Brakes screech as the train lurches to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. Stacks of lumber and pieces of equipment are scattered all around. Skids loaded with cargo are l
ined up along the track beside several forklift trucks.

  “What’s that stuff for?” Amber wonders.

  The answer comes all too soon. A yard worker in coveralls and a hard hat leaps in the door of the boxcar, turning to signal an approaching forklift. He takes one look at the four of us and barks, “What are you kids doing here?”

  Since we have no answer for that, the only course of action is flight. Tori is the first to react. She runs for the open door, which is suddenly blocked by a huge pallet of cargo carried by forklift arms.

  The worker puts an iron grip on her wrist. With his free hand, he grabs a walkie-talkie from his belt. “Security to car thirty-six!”

  Amber and I watch in horror, but Malik springs into battle. He snatches up a full Gatorade bottle and bounces it with deadly accuracy off the side of the man’s jaw. The blow knocks him backward into the wall, and he releases Tori. The four of us make a break for freedom. With the doorway blocked by cargo, Tori squeezes through the gap to the right of the incoming load; Amber and I slip out the opening on the left. The worker reaches for Malik, who drops to the floor and tries to roll under the arms of the forklift.

  He almost makes it. The pallet descends and he’s trapped beneath it, screaming for help.

  Tori and I reach in and try to pull him out, but his legs are stuck as the wooden skid slowly comes down. In a matter of seconds, he’ll be squashed.

  Amber doesn’t hesitate. She leaps into the cab of the forklift, dislodging the driver. The man is so shocked at being suddenly and aggressively attacked by a thirteen-year-old girl that he topples out the other side and sprawls onto the gravel. She slams the heel of her hand into the control and pushes it in the opposite direction. The load lifts off Malik and rises, striking the boxcar’s ceiling. Malik scrambles free, Amber jumps down, and the four of us take off.

  A pudgy uniformed security guard is running along the track in our direction. We look around desperately.

  “There!” Tori exclaims, pointing to some trees.

  There’s a tall chain-link fence in the way, but luckily, the mesh has torn away from the post. We slither underneath and sprint for the woods. It’s the last thing any of us need in our starved and exhausted state. Yet at this point in our adventure, capture is not an option. If we’re arrested here, the local police will start looking for our parents. Then it’s only a matter of time before we’re in the custody of the Purple People Eaters.