by Sechin Tower
The disc rocketed them upwards, where Dean had just enough time to grab the auto-shovel’s ladder before the disc lost power and dropped away under their feet. He reached back, snagged Victor’s sleeve, and pulled him to safety.
The elevator disc fell away into the darkness of the shaft. All was silent for a moment before the sound of a distant crash echoed up to them, followed later by a gust of sulfurous air.
When they finally reached open air, the night was dark and they were alone, but Dean’s truck remained where he had left it.
“I guess she decided a jet pack is faster than a truck,” Victor gasped, leaning on the vehicle and breathing deeply to clear out his lungs.
“Lucky us,” Dean said as he slid behind the wheel and turned the key. “Load up. We’re going to Happy Fun Land.”
Chapter 38 ~ Soap
I’ve sometimes said that making an electromagnet is so easy that anybody could do it with one hand tied behind their back. I never expected that I would be making one with one arm handcuffed to a bench, but life is full of surprises. I just wish my escape plan hadn’t required someone else’s chewing gum.
All of us—me, Nikki, Angela, the monster, and the Blitzkriegers, were all up on the parade ground at the base of the Doomsday Machine. It had taken Angela a little longer to complete the reactor than she had originally planned, but at about three in the morning she ordered everybody out to listen to her speech. The Blitzkriegers crowded around the stage. The red-eyed monster had awakened after its dose of tranquilizer, but it was now safely locked up in a cage behind Angela. I think she wanted it up there so it would help strike fear into her audience. Above her was a huge screen that showed the Professor as he overlooked the whole ceremony like some presiding monarch. He was using the same software to blur out his face and body that he had used when he contacted me by video chat, but he spoke through loudspeakers to emphasize what Angela was saying and to boast that their moment of triumph had arrived.
The whole point of the speeches by Angela and the Professor seemed to be just to say they were ready to throw the switch to conquer the world, but it was a good way to whip their gang into a frenzy.
“Down with all of them!” Shirtless cheered from the front row as he threw a half-full beer can over his head. All the rest of his friends joined in, chanting “Bring them down! Bring them down!” over and over. They never said exactly who they were trying to bring down, but I don’t think it mattered. If they got the Doomsday Machine working, nobody would be left standing.
Angela pumped her fists in the air along with them and made a noise that sounded like a cheer, but I was close enough to hear that she actually said “whatever!” It was clear to me that she was mocking them right to their faces and they didn’t even know it. If only they had been smarter, maybe they would have figured out that she was just using them to get what she wanted. Of course, if they had been smarter they might have been out making a positive contribution to society instead of robbing banks and cheering for the end of the world. I guess there are inherent limits to the intelligence of criminal minions.
While all this was going on, Nikki and I stood to the side of the small stage. She had taken my backpack, removed all the screwdrivers and pliers from my pockets, and handcuffed me to the railing. Now she stood about ten feet in front of me, her lab coat draped over the back of a chair. The pocket hung open, and I knew the key to my cuffs was right inside.
First, I tried reaching for it, pulling against my shackle so hard that it felt like the cuff was going to rip my hand off. But no matter how hard I strained, the closest I could get was brushing the fabric of her coat with my fingertips. Then I came up with the idea of the magnet. I figured if I could attach a magnet to something long, I could dip into the pocket and retrieve the key.
She hadn’t left me with much to work with in my own pockets, but I still had a penlight, my dorm room key, a few loops of thin copper wire, and a jeweler’s screwdriver that was so small Nikki’s search had missed it. I also had Rusty’s tracking bracelet, but Rusty didn’t have a stealth mode, and even though Angela was watching the crowd and the crowd was hanging on her every word, I was pretty sure they would notice a metal scorpion-dog traipsing up to me and using an acetylene torch to cut off my handcuffs. More importantly, Rusty was busy saving the world by rigging up the Doomsday Machine with the earthquake grenades, so I figured I had better leave him where he was.
I wound the copper wire tightly around my dorm key and fed the two ends to the battery I had taken from the penlight. That’s all an electromagnet is: a wire with an electric current wrapped snugly around a metallic object. Anyway, the only item I still needed was something to give the magnet some length.
I looked around my feet, hoping to find a long twig or a stiff cardboard wrapper among all the discarded food containers and gobs of gum on the pavement. It turned out I found something even better than I could have hoped for: a long plastic stick that was used for tying up balloons. It was almost two feet long, and it couldn’t have been better for this experiment if I had ordered it online.
I had enough wire to run along the stick so that I could keep the heavy battery in my hand and dangle the key-turned-magnet off the far end like the hook from a fishing pole. But the problem was that no matter how I tried to tie the wire at the far end, it kept slipping off. I needed some glue to keep it secure. I looked around again, but all I saw was garbage and gum.
Gum. Stupid, sticky gum.
There was a big glop right next to my foot, but it was too dried out to stick easily. However, it could be re-hydrated pretty quickly if someone chewed on it.
The thought made my stomach turn. My mind raced for any other option, but there was none. I was surrounded by a bunch of deranged bikers who seemed ready to graduate from grand larceny to global terrorism, and if I didn’t get out of there, people were going to end up seriously dead. Compared to that, what was the worst thing that could happen to me with all those germs crawling around in that rubbery glob? Except for possibly barfing myself inside-out, my rational mind knew that my chances were worse with the Professor than with the bacteria. I tried not to think about it as I used my screwdriver to scrape the largest, most promising splotch of gum off the pavement.
Even holding it made me want to retch. It was a faded red, frazzled lump with strands that turned white and fibrous when they stretched. I tried not to imagine the microbes squirming around and multiplying on its surface, twitching their hairy little appendages and squeezing their poisonous juices out behind them. I especially tried not to imagine how I would be giving them a red-carpet welcome into my mouth, where they would wriggle and twitch across my tongue and into my bloodstream.
My stomach turned over and I gagged. The problem with imagination is that once you open the faucet you can’t stop the flow.
“What’s your problem back there?” Nikki half turned towards me, but I managed to hide the lump of gum and my improvised electromagnet behind my back.
“Nothing,” I said, feeling bile come up in my mouth. “It’s just—all this makes me sick.”
She snorted and turned back to watch the show. Before I could give it any more thought, I crammed the piece of gum into my mouth. It was only about the size of a cashew nut, but it tasted strongly of rubber and dirt. In my imagination it burned like a nugget of acid with every bite. I pushed saliva at it with my tongue and then recoiled as I realized what my tongue was touching. After gnashing it nine times, it felt like it might be sticky enough (and I felt like I might go into septic shock), so I pulled it out of my mouth and stuck it to the end of the balloon stick. I gagged, and I scrubbed my tongue with my finger. I almost spat, but I didn’t want to give Nikki cause to turn around. I would have gargled with hand sanitizer if she hadn’t taken it away from me, even though that stuff is poisonous. I also threw away the screwdriver I had used to scrape it up because I couldn’t bear to touch it any more.
It was a horrible experience, but it was done. I wished that everyone w
ho complained about me being a germaphobe could have been there to see what I had done, but I wished even harder that I hadn’t needed to do it.
As soon as I had recovered, I pressed the copper wire into the gum on the end of the balloon stick. Then I dipped the electromagnet into Nikki’s coat pocket and fished for the handcuff key. For one minute I froze when Nikki glanced to her left and I thought she was about to turn around or grab her coat, but whatever she saw it must have had nothing to do with me. When she looked back at the stage, I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and inched the key out of the pocket.
Sixty seconds later, I was off and running through the shadows, hoping nobody had noticed me go.
My plan was to sneak out the way I’d come in and get out of that place as fast as the struggling transmission of Brett’s Camaro could carry me. But I hadn’t gone farther than the other side of the Doomsday Machine ride when I heard a funny, sing-song birdcall.
I stopped and looked around, but I couldn’t see anything. Angela’s speech was still going strong, and the Blitzkriegers were hooting and howling like they were at a rock concert. It was the middle of the night, long after birds stopped singing, so I dismissed what I heard and was about to continue on my way. Then I heard it again.
This time I looked up into the scaffolding of the Doomsday Machine ride. There was Choop, looking about as comfortable among the joists and cross-beams as a panther taking a nap in a tree. He looked down at me with those big red eyes and made the birdcall to me again.
“How’d you get here?” I whispered. “And how did you get out of Topsy?”
He chirped again and started to climb, but then he stopped and looked back down as if to see whether I was following.
“Stay hidden,” I whispered. “Just stay hidden if you know what’s good for you, you big gecko. Believe me, you don’t want to meet your younger brother.”
I shuddered at the memory of the recently-hatched monster as it ripped through a table to get at me and I didn’t think it would be any kinder to Choop. This renewed my desire to get out of the park, but the chupacabra spun around in a circle, paused to look down at me, and then repeated this motion again and again.
Is it totally weird to climb a ramp into the scaffolding of a doomsday machine because a spiny reptile-thing seems to want to show you something? The answer is yes, especially when you’re two hundred yards away from a pumped-up biker gang and a couple of very deadly scientists. But, in my defense, I was really curious to see where he was going.
Choop met me on the ramp and kept scampering ahead, turning to wait for me, and then scampering ahead again. He was like Lassie leading me to a boy stuck down a well. As it turns out, he really was trying to show me that someone was stuck, but it wasn’t a boy. It was a robot.
The ramp led up to an open platform that would have become the ride’s exit and gift shop if construction had been finished. Now it was nothing but raw wooden beams and posts, with boards making a floor over fifty square feet of what was obviously intended to have been a much bigger room. In the middle was Rusty, tugging away at his cable that was stuck between some floorboards. He was like a dog tugging at a leash, over and over again, because he simply lacked the problem-solving intelligence to do anything else, which meant he had not completed his mission. The rest of the cable and the other grenades were still stored on his back instead of attached to the tower.
When Angela hit that switch, there would be nothing to stop the Doomsday Machine.
Chapter 39 ~ Dean
Dean kept his foot jammed on the accelerator and was just a little gratified to see Victor’s white-knuckled hands pressing against the dashboard.
“Do you have to go so fast?” Victor asked nervously.
“I could have taken my time,” Dean growled. “If someone had told me yesterday that my cousin was heading into a den of thugs.”
The pickup squealed around a curve in the highway. At sixty, it would have been a gentle turn. At ninety, the truck almost came up on two wheels.
“I can see you’re still mad at me,” Victor said after the truck leveled out.
“You think?”
“You’re the one who started this whole secrecy thing. Remember when we first met? I asked you about the bikers and you told me I shouldn’t know. Then you never seemed to care about what we were doing, so I didn’t feel like I needed to tell you.”
“I saved your life back in that cave,” Dean snorted. “From now on, you tell me everything.”
“Maybe I can pay you back when we get to Happy Fun Land,” Victor said, but it wasn’t very convincing as he squirmed down as far as his seatbelt would allow while the road ripped past them.
Dean slammed on the brakes and then peeled off down the side road he had almost missed. In L.A. it would have been impossible to drive this way at any time of day, even in a fire engine blaring its sirens. At two a.m. in the boondocks, there was no one on the road to get in his way.
“Listen up and listen good,” Dean said over the roar of his engine. “When we get there, you’re going to stay in the car. Got it? You stay in here, keep your head low, and keep the motor running until I get back. Do I make myself clear?”
Victor nodded. “How are you going to get in?” he asked breathlessly. “The whole place is fenced off, you know.”
Dean smiled grimly. “We’re about to find out how a pickup does against a chain-link gate.”
Chapter 40 ~ Soap
As a human being, it was easy for me to see what a robot could not comprehend. All Rusty had to do was back up a bit to un-snag the cable. I made a mental note to add a few lines of code to my next robot so that he wouldn’t have the same problem. For Rusty, it was too late, because he wouldn’t be coming down after he installed the earthquake grenades. It made me sad to watch him climbing dutifully upwards through that dark scaffolding. He was on a suicide mission, but it was the only way to save the world from disaster.
Choop watched the robot go, then looked at me, then back up at the robot. He had seen me with Rusty back in the Topsy lab and he must have led me here because he figured I would want to know where to find my toy. He must have been confused when I let Rusty go climbing away on his own without me.
“You have no idea that you just saved the world, do you?” I asked, even though Choop wasn’t looking at me. But it was true: if Choop hadn’t led me back here, Rusty would never be able to install the earthquake grenades, and there would be nothing to stop the Doomsday Machine.
Suddenly Choop spun in place and froze, looking down the ramp. Then he sprang silently into the air, landing lightly on a cross-beam from which he scampered up and out of sight.
A second later I heard what spooked him: footsteps on the ramp. I wished I could have climbed away like Choop, because a few seconds later Nikki had reached the top of the ramp and I was cornered on the platform. We were thirty feet above the parade ground, so I didn’t have anywhere to go but down.
“Let me go,” I said, trying to sound strong even though I didn’t feel it. “I won’t bother you again. Just let me go.”
“Okay,” she said and stood aside to leave the ramp free and clear.
I blinked. Was this some kind of trick?
“It’s okay, honey,” she said. “I couldn’t let you go earlier because they were all out here fixin’ to catch you again. But now they’re distracted.”
I edged towards the exit, but I didn’t want to turn my back on her.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she said with exasperation in her voice. “Get gone while you still can.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you letting me go if you’re working with them?” I gestured with my head back towards the bright lights of the stage where the bikers were still howling like a pack of dogs.
Nikki looked at me and sighed. “If you’d read more Machiavelli, you might’ve recognized that I’ve been on your side the whole time. It’s called playing a deep game. After the Professor got to you, I knew he would keep trying unti
l something worked, so I volunteered. This way, I’ve been able to control the situation.”
She walked past me to the cable Rusty had stretched across the platform. He had wrapped it around a post when he went up, and it was now so tight at that spot that it twanged like a guitar string when she plucked it.
“I’m bringing this tower down,” I said. “You can’t stop me.”
With her eyes she followed the cable up to the nearest earthquake grenade twenty feet overhead.
“Your plan might work,” she said appraisingly. “But it’s needlessly complicated.”
“You got a better one?”
“I was just a-goin’ to blow it all up,” she turned to me with a smile.
I stared at her.
“I whipped up a home-brew of good, old-fashioned tri-nitrogen tetroxide,” she explained. “You know: TNT. Dynamite. I fooled them all into thinking it was chupacabra chow—the idiots. I made just enough to destroy the reactor down below and maybe cause a distraction while we get away. And I can blow it with this.” She drew her phone out of her pocket and wiggled it around to show me.
I couldn’t believe it. All my work and fear for nothing, because Nikki had it under control the whole time.
“Well, you want to see it go up in smoke?” Nikki smiled big at me as she moved her finger towards the button on her phone. “This here seems as good a time as any. You might want to cover your ears because—ow!”
She shook her fingers and dropped the phone as if it had stung her. It clattered to the deck, where it sparked and then cracked down the middle. A red finger of flame probed its way out of the crack, waved around in the air for a moment, and then dissipated in a pathetic little puff of black smoke.