by Dan Gutman
“Oh hush, Pep,” said Archie Clone. “There’s no way out. I’m sure they told you when you joined The Genius Files that you would get a million dollars when you turn twenty-one years old, right?”
“Yeah, so?” said Coke.
“What they didn’t tell you is that it’s not a million dollars for each of us. It’s a million dollars for all of us. We’ll split it evenly. So let’s say there are a thousand kids who are members of The Genius Files. Do you know what a million dollars divided by a thousand works out to?”
Pep moved the decimal point in her head.
“A thousand dollars,” she said.
“That’s right,” Archie Clone said. “You are pretty smart! Now, I don’t know about you two, but I’m not going to put my life on the line for a lousy thousand bucks when I turn twenty-one.”
“So the more Genius Files kids who die before they reach twenty-one, the more money each survivor gets,” Coke reasoned.
“Hey, you’re catchin’ on, big guy!” said Archie Clone. “And if I happen to be the only survivor, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens.”
“You get all the money!” Pep shouted. “You’re evil!”
“He’s also insane,” Coke added.
“Insane?” Archie Clone said, laughing. “Your mother drove halfway across the country to visit a mustard museum. And I’m the crazy one?”
“How did you know about that?” Pep demanded.
“Oh, I know all about you two,” Archie Clone said, smiling. “I do my homework, like a good boy.”
“How many other Genius Files kids are still alive?” Coke asked. “How many have you killed?”
“That’s none of your concern,” Archie Clone said.
The cage lowered a few more inches and Pep screamed again. The twins pressed themselves tightly against the top.
“Do something, Coke!” Pep shouted.
“What do you want me to do?” he yelled back at her. “Why don’t you figure something out for a change?”
“I didn’t want to come inside this stupid truck in the first place!” she said angrily. “I knew this was going to be trouble. You told me to relax and have fun!”
“I did not!”
“I wish you two would stop bickering,” Archie Clone said. “It’s giving me a headache. Just think of this as a ride. Like at a theme park. Except that at the end, you don’t get ice cream or cotton candy. You die. Ha, ha!”
He cackled an evil laugh as if he had heard it in the movies.
“Let us out!” Pep begged as the boiling oil rose inside the cage.
“Oh, what are you complaining about?” Archie Clone said. “The admission was free. Ha, ha! So put a smile on.”
“You’re sick, dude,” Coke said. “You know that? Genius and insanity go hand in hand. You should get help.”
“Oh, thanks for your expert analysis, Dr. Freud,” Archie Clone said sarcastically. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, Coke. You were going to die anyway. Now you’ll just get it over with, seventy years early. No point in waiting until the last minute, right? Ha, ha!”
“My sneakers are heating up!” Pep yelled. “I can feel it.”
The greasy oil was smoking and spitting as it rose, splattering the twins.
“Don’t worry,” Archie Clone called out, “I don’t use any trans fats. You’ll be dead soon, but at least you’ll die with low cholesterol. Ha, ha!”
“You’ll never get away with this!” Coke told him. “The police will be here any second.”
“You’re right about that,” Archie Clone said. “I must be going. It wouldn’t look good if I was here when the police find your deep-fried bodies.”
“I hate you!” Pep shouted.
Archie Clone ignored her and pushed a button on a remote control, which caused a trap door to open in the floor about ten feet behind him.
“Have a nice life … what’s left of it!” he said as he lowered himself through the hole. “Ha, ha! I’m lovin’ it!”
Archie Clone jumped down through the hole, and the trap door shut over him. This was bad. The one person who could save them, who happened to also be the one person who was trying to kill them, was gone. The cage continued to lower itself into the oil. Now it was inches from their bottoms as they clung to the top of the cage. Sweat was pouring off them, dripping into the boiling oil, and splattering them.
“What are we gonna do?” Pep yelled to her brother. “Do you have anything? A tool? A Frisbee? Anything?”
“Yeah, I happen to have a chain saw in my pocket,” Coke replied sarcastically.
“Oh, great!”
“What would we do with a Frisbee anyway?” Coke asked sharply. “Have a catch to help us forget that we’re about to become human french fries?”
“I don’t know,” Pep said. “Maybe you could jam the Frisbee into those gears or something. Stop the machine.”
Coke looked at the gear mechanism outside the cage. It was about two feet away, turning slowly. He could reach it, but that wouldn’t do any good, unless he was willing to give up a few fingers for the cause.
But then he got an idea.
“Give me your Cheesehead!” he barked.
“What for?”
“Just give it to me!”
Coke grabbed the foam Cheesehead off Pep’s head and carefully climbed over his sister to the part of the cage that was closest to the gear mechanism. The Cheesehead was a little bit too big to fit through the openings in the cage, but it was spongy enough so Coke could squeeze it between the bars.
“Be careful!” Pep said.
“Hold on tight,” Coke ordered her.
He reached his right arm outside the cage and extended the Cheesehead toward the turning gears. Then he pushed the corner of the Cheesehead right between two gears.
The gears bit into the Cheesehead, ripping at the yellow foam. For a moment, it looked like the gears would simply chew the Cheesehead to tiny pieces without slowing down the mechanism. But then there was a groaning noise, a lurch, and the gears stopped turning. They had literally bitten off more than they could chew.
“It stopped!” Pep shouted gleefully. “We’re saved!”
“Not yet,” Coke said.
He still had to climb over to the other side of the cage and open a latch that was holding the top on. After struggling for a few minutes and nearly falling into the boiling oil below him, Coke managed to force open the latch and push up the top of the cage. He climbed out and then extended a hand down to pull his sister up after him. They jumped off the top and landed on the floor without getting hurt. The cage was almost completely submerged in oil.
“Let’s get out of here,” Coke said.
Moments after they pushed open a door and ran out of the truck, Coke and Pep spotted their parents in the parking lot, walking excitedly back to the RV.
“Oh, you kids missed something great,” Dr. McDonald told them.
“You should have seen it!” said Mrs. McDonald. “We found the shoe store. This guy Robert Wadlow was eight feet, eleven inches tall. His foot was enormous. It was three feet long. Imagine that! A foot was three feet. Just amazing.”
“How was the virtual french fry demonstration?” asked Dr. McDonald.
“Very … exciting,” Coke said honestly.
“Yeah, we really got to feel what it must be like to be a french fry,” said Pep.
“Where’s your Cheesehead?” Mrs. McDonald asked her.
“I … uh … lost it,” she replied. It was true, technically.
“I paid $14.99 for that Cheesehead!” Dr. McDonald complained, his voice rising.
“Don’t be mad, Ben,” his wife said. “It’s their birthday.”
“You’re right,” he said with a sigh.
It’s hard to be mad at somebody on their birthday. All Pep did was lose her silly Cheesehead. It wasn’t like she murdered anybody or anything.
“Hey, how about we go to McDonald’s for dinner?” asked Mrs. McDonald. “I
bet you’re really in the mood for french fries after seeing that demonstration, huh?”
The twins looked at each other.
“We’re not hungry,” they said simultaneously.
Chapter 4
THE FIRST CIPHER
It had been a long day. A ridiculously long day. It seemed like ages ago when Coke and Pep were being chased through The House on the Rock by Mrs. Higgins, their evil health teacher. They had clotheslined her with a piece of twine stretched across a walkway in the dark. Then they were grabbed by those two bowler dude maniacs dressed in suits of armor, who dragged them to Dr. Warsaw. He would have killed them for sure if they hadn’t snatched away his portable electronic torture device and pushed him out of the hole in the bottom of The Infinity Room. And now, this Archie Clone lunatic had nearly deep-fried them in a pool filled with boiling oil.
Some birthday.
The next scheduled stop was Chicago, just twenty miles away. But it’s hard to find a place to park an RV overnight in such a big city. So Dr. McDonald decided to splurge and have the family spend the night at a motel in Des Plaines. He pulled into Best Western Des Plaines Inn, just down the road on Lee Street. It would be nice to sleep in a regular bed for a change. Instead of jamming the whole family into one room, they got two—one for the kids and one for the grown-ups.
Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).
Click Get Directions.
In the A box, type Des Plaines IL.
In the B box, type Chicago IL.
Click Get Directions.
The twins didn’t ask for cake or ice cream or some sweet treat to top off their birthday. All they wanted to do was go to sleep, and try to forget what had happened over the last twenty-four hours. They were exhausted.
Before Coke took off his pants, he checked the pockets and found the tickets that Archie Clone had given him for the french fry exhibit. He turned one of them over and saw this written on the back:
HATED DAY HAPPY
Coke puzzled over the three words for a minute, and then handed the ticket to his sister.
“What do you think this means?” he asked.
Pep looked the tickets over. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“Do you think it’s just random words?”
“It may be meaningless,” Pep replied, “or it may be a cipher.”
“Oh no. Not another one,” Coke groaned.
Pep loved ciphers. While Coke’s brain excelled at accumulating and storing huge quantities of information, Pep was good at organizing and analyzing it. She loved word games, number games, and trying to untangle secret messages and codes. She was fascinated by anything to do with spies and spying.
During their drive from California, every few days Dr. Warsaw had sent them a coded message, which Pep was always able to decipher. That’s how they knew to go to The Infinity Room at The House on the Rock. Some of the messages were harder to decipher than others.
But Dr. Warsaw was dead. Or at least they assumed he was dead. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was alive and HATED DAY HAPPY was another secret message from him. Or maybe he had created the message before he died. Or maybe somebody else had taken over the Genius Files operation and was sending them ciphers now. Who knew?
Pep pulled out her notebook, lay down on the bed, and wrote out the letters. She stared at them. The cipher seemed pretty straightforward. It didn’t look like a particularly difficult code to crack.
She turned the letters backward—YPPAH YAD DETAH. Nope, that was meaningless. She wrote down every other letter, and then every third letter. She held a mirror up to the words. She transposed the letters, and then tried jumbling them around randomly. Nothing worked. Everything she did to the cipher made it look less like real words than it had at the start. She was feeling sleepy, like her brain was working at half speed.
And then, just before her eyes were about to close for the night, she figured it out.
“I got it,” she whispered to Coke. “It’s a simple anagram.”
Then she wrote something in her notebook and handed it to her brother.
HAPPY DEATH DAY
Chapter 5
UNEXPECTED GUESTS
It wasn’t until the next morning, when the twins woke up in their motel room, that they were able to fully comprehend the seriousness of their situation. Getting rid of Dr. Warsaw at The House on the Rock had not solved their problem, as they had thought. No, their problem had just begun. People were still after them. Coke and Pep would have to live with that fact, maybe until they themselves were dead, or the people who were trying to kill them were dead. Maybe it was just Archie Clone who was after them now. Or maybe Mrs. Higgins and the bowler dudes were still out there somewhere too. Maybe there were others as well.
It makes it kind of hard to get through your everyday life, knowing that at any moment somebody might try to throw you off a cliff, dip you into boiling oil, drown you in a vat of SPAM, or bury you alive in a sand dune. That’s no way to live.
“We gotta tell Mom and Dad,” Coke said to his sister as they brushed their teeth that morning. “This isn’t some game. The game is over. Mom and Dad will know what to do.”
“Agreed.”
After showering and getting dressed, Coke and Pep knocked on the door of their parents’ room. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald were already dressed and ready to go downstairs to the little breakfast room next to the motel lobby. They were in the middle of a discussion about Dr. McDonald’s next book. His last one, The Impact of Coal on the Industrial Revolution, had not sold very well.
“Honey, maybe you should write about something a little more … commercial next time,” Mrs. McDonald suggested delicately.
“What, like Britney Spears?” Dr. McDonald replied with sarcasm in his voice. “Maybe I should write a book about Lindsay Lohan’s love life. Lots of people would buy that.”
“No, Ben, I mean—”
“We need to talk to you about something,” Coke told his parents.
“What is it, sweetie?” Mrs. McDonald said with concern as they made their way to the breakfast room.
Coke took a deep breath.
“You may find this a little hard to believe,” he began, “but Pep and I are part of a secret government program. It’s called The Genius Files.”
Silence. They continued up to the buffet line to get their food.
“Go on,” urged Dr. McDonald.
“Ever since we left California,” Pep told them, “there have been these crazy people who have been trying to kill us. They forced us to jump off a cliff back home…”
“… and they blew up a building we were in right next to our favorite Chinese restaurant…,” Coke said.
“… and they left us to die at the singing sand dune…,” Pep added.
“… and they tried to drown us at the SPAM Museum…”
“… and they tried to boil us in oil yesterday—”
Dr. McDonald held up his hand to stop them.
“So, you’re telling us that these people are still out there,” he said, “and that your lives are in danger.”
“Right,” Pep said. “We would have told you about all this earlier, but we had been sworn to secrecy.”
They sat down at a table.
“We have GPS devices implanted in our heads,” Coke added, “so the bad guys who are trying to kill us know where we are at all times.”
Dr. and Mrs. McDonald stared at the twins for a long time.
Then they burst out in hysterical laughter.
“Hooo! Hooo!” Dr. McDonald said through the tears that were streaming down his face. “That’s a good one! GPS devices in your heads!”
“It’s not even April Fools’ Day!” said Mrs. McDonald as she wiped her face with a napkin. “How do you kids come up with this stuff? You two are so imaginative!”
“No, we mean it!” Coke protested. “We’re totally serious!”
“You guys crack me up,” Dr. McDonald said, unable to stop laughing. “Bridge, I’m
so glad we changed our minds and decided to have children after all. Our kids never cease to amaze me.”
“They do say the darndest things,” said Mrs. McDonald.
So much for that idea. It didn’t look like their parents were going to be any help at all. Coke and Pep would have to live … or die … on their own.
As their parents chuckled and lingered over their coffee, the twins went outside to talk things over privately.
“What are we gonna do now?” Pep asked.
“How should I know?”
“Maybe we should call the police.”
“Are you out of your mind? They’ll never believe us,” Coke told her. “Mom and Dad didn’t even believe us. You think the cops will?”
Ever since they were little, Coke had been the “big brother,” even though he was only a few minutes older. Pep had come to rely on him to get them out of jams using his mouth, his fists, a deck of cards, a Cheesehead, or whatever happened to be lying around.
Now, though, Coke worried about what was going to happen next. That Archie Clone who’d tried to french fry them could be anywhere. He could be watching them right now, or listening in on their conversations. They would have to track him down. They might have to kill him, before he killed them.
And what about Mrs. Higgins? What about those crazy bowler dudes? What about the other Genius Files kids who might be gunning for them so they could claim the million dollars?
And what about Dr. Warsaw? Maybe he had survived the fall and was out there somewhere, concocting more intricate secret messages and plans to kill them.
As the twins walked back to their room to pack up their stuff and check out of the motel, two maids were blocking the hallway with big carts loaded up with towels, cleaning supplies, and those little plastic shampoo bottles they leave in the rooms.
“Excuse me,” Pep said politely, assuming that would be enough to send the message that they needed to get past.
The maids didn’t turn around. One was holding a broom and the other was fiddling with a vacuum cleaner.
“Pardon me,” Coke said, a little more forcefully. “We need to get to our room.”