by Mo O'Hara
Pradeep and I looked at each other. “No,” we both said at the same time.
“What does he do?” she said, staring at Frankie who was just in normal goldfish mode now, doing laps of backstroke in his bucket. Well, normal for Frankie, anyway.
“Can he fly? Turn invisible? Walk through walls? Shrink? Grow? Go super-stretchy? Jump into alternative dimensions? Bend space?” She paused and looked at us. “I read a lot of comics,” she added. “So what’s the deal?”
“It’s hard to describe,” Pradeep said.
“Swishy fishy zombie fishy,” Sami interrupted. “Swirly, swirly eyes!” Then she started walking around doing her best zombie goldfish impression.
We looked at Geeky Girl, waiting for a response to the fact that we had just admitted to owning a zombie goldfish.
“Cool,” with a vague nod, was the only reaction we got.
“It’s good you’ve kept it off the Internet,” she added. “That’s just the kind of pet that would attract the attention of the kidnapper.”
“We were so sure the kidnapper was Mark,” I said. “Whenever there’s an evil plot, he’s usually behind it.”
“Him?” Geeky Girl stared at Mark in disbelief.
Then Pradeep spoke up, “What if Sanj is involved?”
“Who’s Sanj?” said Geeky Girl.
“My Evil Computer Genius big brother,” Pradeep replied.
“You two have weird families,” Geeky Girl said with a frown.
“But Sanj is away at boarding school, right?” I said.
“Yes, and Mom and Dad even had a Skype call with him yesterday. He was definitely in his room at school. There’s no way he could have kidnapped any pets around here today or earlier this week,” Pradeep said.
“If it’s not him,” Geeky Girl said, pacing the floor, “then we have to track down the real kidnapper, and fast.”
“Find Toby,” Sami sniffled.
“I say, you’re all looking rather stressed again. Why don’t I go and ask that charming Mrs. Martin if I can make you all some camomile tea? I know I could certainly use a cup!” Mark said, standing up.
“There will be NO TEA until we get Boris back,” Geeky Girl yelled, slamming the table with her fist.
“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” Mark whispered to me.
“Extreme!” I said out loud. “That’s it. We need to think extreme.” I looked around at their confused faces. “If the kidnapper wants to find special pets, then we have to let him think he’s found an extremely special one.”
Pradeep stood up. “Yes, let’s post something up on the Internet about a super-special pet and see if the kidnapper will strike. Then we can catch him in the act!”
“The problem is,” I said slowly, “the only special pet we have is Frankie, and we don’t want to risk posting anything online about his actual powers.”
Frankie jumped out of his bucket and splashed us.
“Not now, Frankie,” Pradeep said.
But Frankie jumped out again anyway. This time he landed on Mark’s head, nibbled off a lock of hair and jumped back into the bucket.
“I say, little fish, that’s extremely rude!” Mark looked at his hair in the reflection of one of the computer screens. “I have to admit though, it did need a trim and you’ve done a great job…”
“Frankie, what are you doing?” I said.
Frankie jumped up again and this time snatched Pradeep’s glasses from his nose with a single swipe.
“Hey!” cried Pradeep. “I need those!”
Frankie splashed back into the bucket and peered up at us with the glasses on his face and the lock of hair above his mouth like a fishy mustache.
“Aha!” I said. “You’re in disguise!”
“If we disguise Frankie as some other kind of super-creature, then we won’t risk anyone finding out he’s actually a zombie goldfish,” Pradeep said.
“Good thinking, Frankie,” I said. “But I still don’t like the idea of using you as bait to catch the kidnapper.”
Frankie jumped up and the mustache and glasses went flying as he fishy-karate-chopped the air.
“I know, you can take care of yourself,” I huffed as I leaped to catch Pradeep’s glasses. “But we’ll be right there too as backup.”
Frankie plopped back into the bucket as I handed Pradeep his soggy glasses.
“So, what shall we disguise your goldfish as?” Geeky Girl asked.
We thought about that.
“How could anyone want to kidnap this cute little fishy?” Mark said, leaning over the bucket and reaching out his hand to stroke Frankie.
In a second Frankie went into zombie green-eyed attack mode and snapped at Mark’s fingers.
“That fish is more like a piranha than a goldfish,” said Geeky Girl, sounding far more impressed now than when we first revealed that Frankie was a zombie goldfish.
Then Pradeep got what could only be described as a giant lightbulb over his head. “Then that’s what he’ll be! We’ve got some green paint left and we can make a bigger tail and body with tinfoil. He’ll look great.” He started typing away on one of the keyboards and a picture of an Amazonian piranha came up on screen. “We could totally make Frankie look like that.”
“Then we’ll just have to put a photo and some posts on the net about our super-poisonous pinching piranha,” Geeky Girl added. “It’ll be a challenge the kidnapper won’t be able to resist.”
CHAPTER 6
FISHY FOUL PLAY
Sami and I set to work on the transformation of Frankie while Pradeep and Geeky Girl set up some hidden cameras with microphones in the living room. Luckily Mrs. Martin had a fish tank in the shop that we could use to put Frankie in. Man, that corner shop has everything!
“Fishy stay still!” Sami said as Frankie thrashed away while she was trying to stick on the tinfoil tail.
“Come on, Frankie. It was your idea to be in disguise,” I whispered to him.
Frankie flopped over on his back with a fishy sigh and stayed still so Sami could do the tail sticking.
Then I touched up the green paint around his gills and mouth.
Mark spent his time helpfully opening doors, handing us bits of stuff we needed and bringing us all endless cups of tea. I mean, we’re kids. We don’t really drink tea! This new, nice, helpful Mark was really freaking me out.
When Frankie was ready, Sami went and got a mirror from Geeky Girl’s nightstand.
“Fishy look scary!” Sami said with a smile. “Snap, snap, snap fishy teeth.”
We angled the mirror so Frankie could see himself. As soon as he caught a glimpse he went into immediate zombie attack stance, ready to fight whatever creature was about to attack him. Until he realized he was looking at himself!
“So what do you think, Frankie?” I said.
“You look like a very poisonous pinching piranha to me,” Mark said.
Frankie glared at his reflection, then struck a couple of action poses.
“I think he approves.” I grinned.
When Pradeep and Geeky Girl were done with all the technical stuff we took a photo of Frankie, uploaded it to the web and waited. Almost as soon as we had put it online, Mark’s phone rang. We all jumped.
“Hello, Mom!” Mark beamed down the phone. “Yes, Tom and Pradeep and Sami are all with me. We’re having a lovely time dressing up the fish…” I grabbed the phone off Mark.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Tom.”
“Are you boys OK? You don’t normally hang out with Mark unless I make you,” she said.
“Really, we’re fine, we went to the shops and then had a nice cup of tea,” I said. As soon as the words left my mouth, I could picture the face Mom was making. No way would she believe me!
“OK…” She paused. “And what’s all this about dressing up the fish?”
“Oh, Sami’s in her mermaid outfit. Mark was just making a joke. She’s dressed as a fish, get it?” I tried.
“No, but never mind. I’ll be home in a f
ew hours. Just head over to Pradeep’s house when you’re done and I’ll pick you up from there. I’ll let his mom know that her kids are with Mark too and you’ll head over soon.”
We just had time to breathe before the computer beeped. Geeky Girl had set up the website to alert us when anyone viewed the picture.
“So we know someone has spotted it. If they’re the kidnapper, then we’ve got to be ready,” Pradeep had said.
Geeky Girl, Mark and Sami all stayed in Lost Pet HQ while Pradeep and I carried Frankie in the fish tank into the living room. All the cameras were trained on the tank.
Pradeep and I hid. We were ready to jump out as soon as anything suspicious happened.
Half an hour slid slowly by, then an hour. The thing they don’t tell you about stakeouts on spy shows is that they are really, really, REALLY boring. Pradeep went through maths problems in his head to make himself stay awake. I tried the same technique, but was asleep by 2 x ZZZzzzzzz. I was jolted awake by a crash outside the room.
Something or someone was in the hall. Pradeep and I gave each other our look that meant, “This is it!”
We both jumped out from our hiding places and ran into the hall. There was a window open and the table beneath it had pieces of a broken vase lying around it. Someone must have climbed through the window and broken the vase getting in! As we were looking at the broken china on the floor we heard the living-room door slam behind us and the lock click. We ran back to the door and rattled the handle. We were locked out!
The kidnapper must be inside, and so was Frankie!
CHAPTER 7
THE KIDNAPPER STRIKES
“We know you’re in there … pet-kidnapper person!” I shouted.
“Yeah, and you’re trapped so you might as well give yourself up now,” Pradeep added.
We rattled the doorknob and pushed on the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. We could hear crashing about from inside the room.
“Frankie!” I shouted.
“Maybe we can get in through the living-room window,” Pradeep yelled, already running down the hall, “if we go around the side of the building. Come on!”
As we raced past Geeky Girl’s room we shouted, “The kidnapper’s got Frankie. Come on!”
We ran out of the front of the shop, past Mrs. Martin, who was selling a customer a paper, and around the side of the building. As Pradeep hoisted me up so I could look into the window, we heard the living-room door slam again.
“Maybe that’s Mark and Geeky Girl,” I said. “Maybe they broke down the door.”
But when I looked in the window the room was empty. No kidnapper, no Mark, no Geeky Girl.
But worse, no, much, much worse … no Frankie!
We heard a startled squeal from Mrs. Martin and raced back to the shop.
“What happened?” Pradeep and I asked Mrs. Martin together.
“He scared the life out of me,” she said, fanning herself with a newspaper. “He just ran out through the shop. He was carrying a bag. Oh my, have we been robbed?” She sat down on the pile of newspapers.
“No!” Pradeep and I said at the same time.
I had to think quickly. There was no way we could tell Mrs. Martin that our zombie goldfish, disguised as a poisonous pinching piranha, had been kidnapped as part of an evil plot to kidnap paranormal pets!
“I mean,” I began, “it’s, er, a game we’re playing. You know … the guy with the bag is ‘It,’ and we have to chase him!”
“Well, you were making a terrible racket!” The color seemed to come back to Mrs. Martin’s cheeks. “I was just about to yell up to tell you to stop crashing around in there when that boy ran out,” she said.
“A boy?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, standing up. “In a black hood thing. I suppose part of your game too? Now can you all just play quietly for a while?”
“Yes, Mrs. Martin,” we said together, and raced back to Geeky Girl’s bedroom.
Pradeep shot me a look that said, “Phew, at least Mrs. Martin bought our story!”
“But where are Geeky Girl and Mark?” I said out loud. “Why didn’t they try to stop the kidnapper when we called them?”
We opened the door to find Geeky Girl asking Mark if he fancied a nice cup of tea. Sami was chanting “Swishy little fishy!” quietly to herself with her fingers in her ears as she stared at one of the computer screens with one eye and up Mark’s left nostril with the other.
Mark pulled his earphones out of his ears. “Pardon? What did you say?” he said to Geeky Girl. “I’ve just been listening to some whale song to relax. You really should try it.”
Geeky Girl turned to Pradeep and me. “You both look quite upset. I was just saying that a cup of tea would be lovely,” she said with a winning smile.
“It’s happened to her too,” Pradeep cried.
“Noooo! She’s been nicified!” I croaked.
We bolted back to the living room to look for clues. There were blobs of green paint and torn bits of foil floating in the tank and strewn all around the room.
“Whatever happened, Frankie didn’t go easily,” Pradeep said.
“And most of the disguise has come off, so the kidnapper must have known he wasn’t getting a poisonous pinching piranha, but he took him anyway,” I said.
“I just hope the cameras caught something, or we’ll be no closer to knowing who the kidnapper is. We’ll have lost Frankie for nothing!” Pradeep exclaimed.
We headed back to the Lost Pet HQ, aka Geeky Girl’s bedroom. Geeky Girl and Mark were happily drinking tea, while Sami had wandered over to the incident board of missing-pet photos and had her back to us. She still had her fingers in her ears.
Pradeep pulled up the video feed from the cameras. You could see the door opening and closing and then see it shaking. “That must be us trying to get in,” I said. “But why can’t we see who’s in there with Frankie?”
The cameras were focused on the tank and the door in the background. Then we saw a figure come into view from the last place we expected … the ceiling! A hooded figure dropped down on a wire and hung suspended over the tank, Mission: Impossible-style. We paused the video.
“Now, that is cool,” Pradeep and I said at the same time. “Evil, but cool.”
CHAPTER 8
A ZOMBIE CONNECTION
“Look—he’s got sucker cups on his hands and knees!” cried Pradeep, rewinding the video and playing it again at half-speed. “He must have come in through the window and hidden on the hall ceiling, and then crawled into the living room when we were distracted by the broken vase on the floor.”
Next the video showed Frankie jumping up and starting to fish-slap the kidnapper as he hung from the ceiling like a giant spider. You could tell Frankie was trying to zombie stare him too, but the guy was wearing tinted glasses and a balaclava. Lots of the tinfoil came off Frankie in the fight. The kidnapper grabbed at Frankie several times before he finally caught him in a gloved hand. Then with the other hand he grabbed what looked like a ray gun of some kind. Not that I’ve seen a lot of ray guns, but this is kind of what I would imagine a ray gun to look like—all metal, with lights on the side and a cone-like thing at the front that sort of looked like a showerhead. Suddenly Frankie lurched toward one of the cameras and stared directly at the lens.
“Quick, look away!” I shouted at Pradeep, covering his eyes and closing mine. “He’s doing the zombie stare.”
“Swishy fishy. Must find swishy fishy.” I looked over to see Sami still staring up at the incident board with her ears plugged.
“Oh great! Now that’s set her off,” Pradeep said.
“Um … Pradeep, I think she’s actually hypnotized!” I said, remembering that Sami had been staring at the computer screens when we first came into the room. “She must have been looking at the screen when Frankie stared into the camera!”
Then we heard a splash and looked back at the video screens. Frankie was now in a dark bag. The kidnapper held up his ray gun to the camera
microphone and pressed a button. A flash went off and then a click and a high “Hummmmmmm…” noise. Pradeep quickly leaned across and turned off the volume button.
“That sound,” he said. “It’s barely in the audible range for humans. Only kids would be able to hear it.”
“How do you know that?” I said, shaking my head to try to get rid of the ringing in my ears. “Ouch, that hurts.”
“I did a project on the frequency of sound waves last year,” Pradeep said. “As you grow up you lose the ability to hear really high-pitched sounds. I think that that sound must have something to do with Mark and Geeky Girl turning so horribly nice.”
“But why would the kidnapper use a frequency that only affects kids?” I asked.
“It was the kids who posted the information online about their super-pets. Maybe the pet kidnapper thought if he turned the pet owners ‘mostly nice,’ they wouldn’t stop him from taking their pets.”
“So why would they put up Missing signs then?” I asked.
“The kidnapper would expect that if the kids’ parents wanted to put up signs, the kids would be too polite not to help! It’s evil, but clever!”
“But why was Mark affected? He doesn’t have a pet to steal!” I went on. “And why was Geeky Girl nicified, but Mark wasn’t double-nicified … or un-nicified? And what about Sami? Is she nice-zombified?” I stopped as I was confusing myself with my made-up words.
“You boys really ought to listen to this whale song. It’s soooo soothing,” Mark said, holding his earphones out toward Geeky Girl.
“Wait! Mark was listening to that clicking, whining, whale stuff when the ray gun went off. And Sami was already zombified! Frankie must have made her put her fingers in her ears, so that’s why only Geeky Girl actually heard it,” Pradeep said.
“A spot of whale song sounds lovely,” Geeky Girl said. “May I?” She reached for the earphones.
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think I can take both of them being like this.”
“So now we’re stuck with two nicified people and one zombified toddler, and we’re no closer to finding out who the kidnapper is or finding Frankie,” Pradeep said, slumping into a chair.