by Dan Gutman
“I already told you,” Archie Clone said. “The last living Genius Filer gets a million dollars when they turn twenty-one years old. And I intend to be that last person. Every time one of us dies, it’s more money in my pocket. Don’t take it personally. You understand, I’m just looking after my long-term financial future.”
Archie Clone flipped a switch, and two large glass cylinders slowly lifted up from the floor of the truck where Coke and Pep were sitting, surrounding them. It was like they were sitting inside two enormous test tubes.
“Enough talk,” Archie Clone said. “You kids are pretty cool. And you’re going to get a lot cooler.”
“What is this?” Coke demanded as the glass cylinder reached the level of his neck and locked into place. He was sawing at the rope behind his back with the Pez dispenser but didn’t know if it was actually cutting anything.
“Do you kids know what hypothermia is?” Archie Clone asked.
“It’s when your body loses heat faster than it can produce it,” Coke replied.
“Very good! No wonder you were chosen for The Genius Files,” Archie Clone said.
He pulled the handle down on a machine. Soft, yellowish ice cream squeezed out of two tubes hanging from the roof of the truck above the glass cylinders. The ice cream dropped down, splattered against Coke and Pep’s heads, and then slid down their faces. Coke stuck out his tongue and tasted it. Vanilla.
“Owwww!” Pep yelled as the ice cream trickled down her back. “That’s cold!”
“Very!” Archie Clone said. “But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, sister!”
He flipped another switch, and dollops of chocolate ice cream poured down on the twins’ heads.
“You’re crazy!” Pep shouted.
Archie Clone ignored her.
“You see,” he said, “when the human body is exposed to extreme cold, it can’t replenish the heat that’s being lost. You get hypothermia. I love the sound of that word. Don’t you? Hy-po-ther-mia. Sounds like the name of a Greek god.”
Thick globs of chocolate and vanilla ice cream kept squeezing out of spouts over the twins’ heads. Ice cream slid down over them and settled to the bottom of the glass cylinders, soaking their sneakers. Coke sawed more frantically on the rope with the Pez dispenser behind his back. The Mister Softee theme jingled repeatedly in the background.
“It’s c-c-cold!” Pep muttered.
“Of course it’s cold,” Archie Clone said as frozen treat crept up their ankles. “It’s ice cream! I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream. Everybody likes ice cream, right?”
“I like eating it,” Coke grunted, “not sitting in it.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Coke,” Archie Clone said with a chuckle. “You shouldn’t complain about getting too much of a good thing.”
“Just take our stupid money!” Pep begged. “We don’t care about the million dollars!”
“Yes, it would be so much simpler if we could handle it that way,” Archie Clone said. “But rules are rules. Paperwork, and all that nastiness. Legally, you two have to be dead for me to collect my money.”
“Help!” Coke shouted, sawing frantically. “Get us out of here.”
“You’d be better off conserving your heat energy, Coke,” Archie Clone advised. “Nobody can hear you. We’re in a tunnel under the park. And nobody would be able to hear you over the Mister Softee jingle anyway. Isn’t it delightfully annoying? Maybe next time I’ll just play this song in someone’s ear over and over again until they kill themselves. That would save me a lot of work. Hahahaha!”
The ice cream was getting higher. Coke sneezed.
“Catching a little cold, Coke?” Archie Clone asked with fake concern. “You know, normal body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees. When your temperature drops below ninety-five, you’ll get goose bumps and start shivering, first gently, and then violently. Your speech may be slurred. Your limbs may feel numb.”
The twins were starting to feel all those symptoms. Ice cream was pouring down on them. It was now almost waist level. Coke wondered if wet rope is easier to cut through, or harder.
“When your temperature drops below ninety-three degrees,” Archie Clone continued, “your muscles will become uncoordinated. Your body will start shutting down to preserve glucose. Your blood vessels will contract and your body will use all its remaining energy to keep your vital organs warm. You’ll become pale and appear dazed. Your lips, ears, fingers, and toes will turn blue. That’s my favorite color! I can’t wait!”
“Gee, thanks for the biology lesson,” Coke said sarcastically.
“No problem, Coke. I know how much you enjoy learning new things. Well, I think you’ll find this bit of trivia interesting. When your body temperature drops below eighty-eight degrees, it will become hard for you to speak. Your pulse and respiration will slow down. Your brain will slow down. That famous photographic memory of yours won’t work anymore. Your hands won’t work anymore either.”
The Mister Softee theme droned on. Coke had developed a headache. Archie Clone walked up close to the glass and peered at him.
“You’ll become disoriented,” he continued. “You’ll start behaving irrationally. Your major organs will start to fail. You’ll curl up in a fetal position to conserve heat. Finally, your heart will stop. And then you’ll die. Ha, ha!”
He had an evil grin on his face. Pep began to cry.
“Oh, don’t worry, Pep,” Archie Clone said. “This won’t take long. That’s the nice thing about hypothermia. It’s all over before you know it. That is so much more humane than a long, lingering death, don’t you think?”
Coke was shivering, and his feet were numb. But Pep was slightly smaller and lighter. She was feeling the effects of the freezing more severely. She could no longer move her fingers.
“Do something!” she told her brother.
Archie Clone pushed the handle back up. The flow of ice cream stopped. Coke and Pep were sitting there, with ice cream up to their necks.
Coke wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d made some progress cutting the rope with the Pez dispenser. He would need more time, though.
The only way to get out of the Mister Softee truck alive, he decided, was to keep this nut job talking. Coke would have to reason with him. It hadn’t worked with his dad, but it might work with someone whose mind was already twisted.
“I bet you were never one of the cool kids back in school, were you?” Coke asked Archie Clone. “The cool kids picked on you because of your red hair and your weight.”
Archie Clone wasn’t taking the bait.
“Now you’re one of the cool kids, aren’t you, Coke?” he replied. “Soon you’ll be so cool you’ll be frozen. Like frozen yogurt.”
“What is it with you and food?” Coke asked, shivering. “First you tried to cook us like french fries, and now you’re going to freeze us with ice cream. Maybe you have an eating disorder. Did you ever think of that? You’re seriously overweight. Do you wear hats all the time so people won’t notice how heavy you are?”
“Oh, do you like this hat?” Archie Clone asked. “It was one of the first ones in my collection.”
“You need help, man,” Coke said. “I think you may be bipolar.”
“Your amateurish attempts at psychology are amusing,” Archie Clone told Coke. “You would make a great shrink. That is, if you weren’t going to die within the hour.”
“Oh, I get it,” Coke said, almost smiling. “Food is killing you, so you decided to kill other people by using food. Is that what’s going on in that sick mind of yours?”
“Why … are you trying to analyze him?” Pep asked her brother. “He’s … a lunatic!”
But Pep was stuttering and slurring her words, so they could barely be understood. She was shivering violently. Coke didn’t have a lot of time. He was still sawing away at the rope behind his back.
“You should listen to your sister,” Archie Clone told Coke. “She’s a smart cookie. But right now, I�
�d say her body temperature has dipped to around ninety degrees. Her internal organs are shutting down, and she’s sounding like a drunk. I really don’t want to see her die.”
“So … you’re … going to … let me go?” Pep asked hopefully.
“No,” Archie Clone replied. “I still want you to die. I just don’t want to see you die. Death is so … morbid. I’m leaving. The authorities can pick up your bodies later.”
He pulled off the Mister Softee uniform and went back to the front of the truck.
“Ta-ta, twins,” he said as he opened the door. “I’ll think of you while I’m spending my million dollars.”
“Do something!” Pep yelled when Archie Clone was gone.
“I am doing something!”
A few seconds later, the edge of the Pez dispenser finally broke the last strand of the rope around Coke’s wrists. He freed his hands and stood up.
“How did you do that?” Pep asked.
“I’ll tell you later.”
Coke closed his eyes for a moment. He was dizzy, and realized he should not have stood up so quickly.
“Rock the tube!” Pep urged him.
It was a good idea. Coke struggled to put his hands on the top of the circular glass around him. Filled with gallons of ice cream, it was very heavy. But when he put weight on the left side, it moved slightly.
He pushed on the right side, and then back on the left. It was moving ever so slightly.
“Put all your weight on one side!” Pep yelled.
“It will fall!”
“I know! That’s the idea!”
Coke did as his sister suggested. He leaned back and then forward hard. His momentum caused the back edge of the glass tube to lift up and the front to move forward. And then it reached the literal “tipping point.” The whole thing toppled over. Shielding his eyes with one hand, Coke fell with it, landing with a crash on the floor. The tube shattered. Ice cream and broken glass were everywhere.
It was no time to do a touchdown dance. Coke jumped up from the dripping mess and grabbed his sister’s tube from the top.
“Hold on!” he ordered her.
“To what?”
One good yank and Pep’s glass tube toppled over too, with the same result. She was spitting out ice cream. Coke rushed to untie her, and noticed her skin had turned a pale blue. He looked around frantically for something he could use to warm her up.
“Quick!” he shouted, pulling down a handle on one of the machines. “Rub this all over yourself!”
“What is it?”
“Hot fudge,” Coke replied as the brown stuff squirted out of the spout.
The hot fudge felt so good on his skin that Coke covered himself with the stuff too. Soon their body temperatures were rising and they were feeling almost normal again. They stepped over the broken glass carefully and ran out of the Mister Softee truck.
If you were at Hershey Park in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and you saw a couple of thirteen-year-old twins covered from head to toe in chocolate sauce, it probably wouldn’t seem like such a big deal. But when Coke and Pep staggered out of the tunnel and people saw them stumbling around Cedar Point, there was a lot of pointing, laughing, and cell phone photography.
“Look!” Coke told his sister. “The log flume! Follow me!”
He ran to the shallow pool of water at the end of the log flume ride, and without any hesitation, jumped in. Pep followed.
They splashed around for a minute, and when they climbed out, the ice cream and hot fudge sauce had washed away. They were just two very wet kids.
“We better find Mom and Dad,” Pep said.
Coke reached for his cell phone and instantly realized it was dead. You can’t soak a cell phone in ice cream, hot fudge sauce, and water and expect it to keep working.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Dr. and Mrs. McDonald spotted them in the distance.
“What are you going to tell them?” Pep asked her brother.
“The truth,” he said, “like I always do.”
Their parents rushed over to greet the twins and saw that they were soaking wet.
“What happened to you two?” asked Mrs. McDonald.
“We were kidnapped by an evil Mister Softee,” Coke explained. “He tried to induce hypothermia by covering our bodies with ice cream.”
“Ha, ha!” Dr. McDonald said. “That’s a good one. You kids crack me up.”
“Why didn’t you call us?” asked their mother. “Why do you think we got you cell phones?”
“They got wet,” Coke explained, holding up his useless phone.
“You went for a swim with your cell phone in your pocket?” Mrs. McDonald asked. “Are you out of your minds?”
Dr. McDonald didn’t like conflict. He tried to avoid it whenever possible.
“We’ll get them new cell phones, honey,” he said. “It’s no big deal. So, what do you say, how about we get some ice cream?”
“No!”
Chapter 12
DUCT TAPE AND ROCK AND ROLL
Coke and Pep were still in a state of shocked disbelief as the RV pulled out of the huge Cedar Point parking lot. Mya and Bones had told them they would be safe until they got to Washington. And then this happened.
Every time they let down their guard, Coke thought, every time they took a deep breath and relaxed a little, something terrible happened. Maybe they would never be safe. Maybe these lunatics would be chasing them for the rest of their lives.
“So how were the roller coasters?” Mrs. McDonald asked excitedly. “Did you have an awesome time?”
“Yeah,” Coke replied without enthusiasm. “Awesome.”
“Awesome,” mumbled Pepsi.
Their parents were disappointed. They had devoted the whole day to doing something just for the kids, but it didn’t seem to have made the kids happy. They just sat in the back of the RV, silently. Dr. McDonald figured that after riding a dozen roller coasters and being dropped, flipped, spun, and thrown every which way, maybe the twins’ brains were a little out of whack.
It was getting past dinnertime. Dr. McDonald pulled into Cedar Point Camper Village, a few miles away in Sandusky. The campground featured a shuffleboard court, a game room, and an outdoor pool. But all Coke and Pep wanted to do was sleep. They didn’t even want dinner. Their parents went to the snack bar to get something for themselves.
Having gone to bed so early, Coke woke up at five a.m., before anyone else in the family. He pulled on a pair of jeans and wandered outside. The campground was quiet. It was peaceful. Nobody else was awake. The only thing open was the game room, so Coke went in.
It was a tiny room, with just three arcade games in it—a shoot-’em-up called Kill Them All, a driving game called Pedal to the Metal, and an old Ms. Pac-Man machine. Despite the hour, the games were plugged in and turned on, playing their “attract mode.” That’s the screen display that is shown when nobody is playing an arcade game. The idea is to attract the next player. Or, more specifically, the next quarter.
Kill Them All looked interesting. The screen showed guys in camouflage blowing away an army of zombies with machine guns. INSERT COIN flashed in the middle of the screen. Coke stepped up to the console and reached into his pocket. He didn’t have any money with him. The coin return was empty. He pushed the start button for the heck of it, on the off chance that the last player had walked away in the middle of a game. Instantly, this flashed on the screen:
EKOC EKOC EKOC EKOC EKOC
Well, it didn’t take an encryption expert—or his sister—to figure out that EKOC was COKE backward. And Coke was pretty sure those letters were not referring to the soft drink. In a few seconds they were replaced by this message, in bright blue glowing letters:
WBUAOHYY
It flashed just once and disappeared in a simulated puff of smoke, but Coke had already memorized it. He ran back to the RV and woke up his sister.
“I think we got another cipher,” he whispered in her ear.
“Where?” Pep asked,
rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“On the screen of a video game in the game room.”
Coke took Pep’s notebook and wrote the letters out.
WBUAOHYY
Quietly, so they wouldn’t wake their parents, the twins tiptoed outside to sit at the picnic table next to their RV.
“It looks a little like the call letters of a radio station,” Pep said as she examined the message.
“Too many letters,” Coke told her. “Radio stations are always WHYY or WCBS, stuff like that.”
“You say you saw this on an arcade game screen?” Pep asked. “How do you know it isn’t the name of the person who has the high score, or something like that?”
“Before it flashed this message,” Coke told her, “it was flashing E-K-O-C over and over again. My name backward. I know it’s a message for me.”
Pep looked at the letters more closely. Obviously, they didn’t mean anything spelled backward. It didn’t seem to be an anagram. Every second, third, or fourth letter meant nothing. The consecutive Ys made her think “why why” could be part of the message, but nothing else seemed to fit. She tried all the usual codes she knew, but none of them worked. This was a tough one.
The sun was peeking through the trees. People were starting to emerge from their tents and RVs to begin their day.
And suddenly, Pep got it.
“It’s simple!” she said excitedly. “This is a half-reversed alphabet!”
Pep took the pen from her brother and wrote out the alphabet in two lines.
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
“I don’t get it,” Coke said.
Pep drew a line under the cipher: WBUAOHYY.
“If you break the twenty-six letters of the alphabet into two lines of thirteen letters,” Pep said, “each letter is directly above or below another letter. The W is below the J, so the first letter of the message could be J.”
“If that’s true,” Coke said, “the second letter of the message would have to be O, because B is above O.”
“Right,” Pep said. “And the third letter is… H. And the fourth letter is… N.”
“John!” Coke exclaimed.