The Hole in the Wall

by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  “Not yet, but someday maybe. Obviously I’ve had a lot of free time, and Stan’s been teaching me some things. You’ll be happy to know I’ve finished my high school diploma already. As soon as we find a cure, I’m going to start working on degrees in biochemical engineering and physics. But I can’t go to college with these legs.” He gave his left brace a slap.

  “You seem to get around all right,” Ma said.

  “True. The problem is we don’t know yet exactly how the adrium poison spreads, and we don’t have an antidote yet. Until we know it’s contained, Stan says we can’t risk exposing the public.”

  Did he say poison? “Thanks a lot for nothing!” I said, punching his arm. “Are we going to be prisoners at ORC now like you?”

  “Seb, I’m not a prisoner. I’m in secret quarantine. And you, dough boy, have already been exposed. Everyone at home may have been. Our property has the most intense concentration of unstable adrium I’ve—whoops.” He looked over his shoulder again. “Forget I said that.”

  The pickup had bumped to a sudden stop. Stan Odum was showing his hairy hand to the electric eye that opened the security gate. After all those spying missions, I was finally entering the Onion.

  18

  Now that the truck had stopped, I heard Barbie’s teeth chattering. Mine decided to join hers. We’d gotten chilled in the cave, and riding in the open air had sucked any remaining warmth out. On the bright side, I noticed that my teeth didn’t ache anymore, even when they clanked together like ice.

  Jed put an arm around each of us and rubbed our shoulders briskly as he said, “Don’t worry, guys. Stan will take good care of you. He’s really a good fella underneath all the bulldozers. The Gash to the Onion was graveled with good intentions.”

  Boots Odum a good fella? This was not the same Jed who used to picket outside the entrance to ORC, protesting the ruin of the land in the gore.

  The truck spiraled downward through a parking garage with several floors. The top floor held all the huge equipment under the height of the dome—bulldozers, dump trucks, backhoes. The middle floors held more cars than I’d expect during the wee hours of Sunday night. There must be more people working here than I ever realized.

  On the bottom floor, we passed a bunch more vehicles—one, a very familiar rusty red pickup. Me and Barbie gaped at each other.

  Ma seemed stunned. “What’s your father’s truck doing here?”

  We all looked at Jed.

  “I’ll explain later,” he whispered. “The walls in this place have ears. And eyes. Beware.”

  We went all the way to the end of the spiral and stopped right next to the entrance on the bottom floor. We must have been pretty deep underground. The parking spot had the number one painted on the concrete and a RESERVED CEO sign posted on the wall.

  “We’re here.” Jed scooched himself to the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate, then dropped to the floor, moving better than I expected him to in his leg braces. “Come on.” He held out his hand to help Ma down.

  “Alrighty, then,” said Boots Odum, joining us. He hoisted up his jeans by the belt loops, reminding me so much of Pa that I stepped behind Ma. “I realize you folks will want to know why I brought you here instead of taking you home. Unfortunately, there’s a lot I can’t say. Some questions simply don’t have answers. Some things, I can’t say because of classified information. So please bear with me.”

  “Classified by whom?” said Ma in a tight voice, her arms crossed over her chest. “Are you working for the government, Stan?”

  Boots Odum ignored that and continued with his welcome speech. “One thing I do know is that we have to scan you all immediately, just to make sure you’re all right.”

  “All right,” said Ma, her arms still crossed. “Why wouldn’t we be all right?”

  He winced at her apologetically, then looked at his watch. “We’d better hurry.”

  I wanted to ask why the rush, but I figured that was classified too.

  Our host stepped to the entrance, showed his hand to another electric eye, and led the way past a series of wide elevators down a long hallway with white concrete block walls, like at school. I followed at his heels, taking it all in.

  The legendary boots clickety-clacked on the hard tile floor and left a faint trail of leathery aroma along with clods of mud they were tracking in. Jed’s steps went THUMP unevenly behind us, like one leg took longer than the other, but he kept up.

  The walls had lots of doors. Some had normal department names like Human Resources or Payroll, and some had mysterious names like Project Foobar or Little Genius Lab. Every door had a security scanner. You probably had to let an electric eye scan your hand to use the bathroom if you worked at ORC.

  Occasionally an archway would curve off into another hallway, reminding me of the passages in the tunnel where we’d found the cavern. A strange sweet scent that I recognized right away drifted from one hallway.

  “I know that smell from somewhere,” said Ma.

  “What is that smell, Mr. Odum?” I had a pretty good idea it was adrium, but I wanted to hear what Boots would say. He didn’t answer, so I stopped and turned on my heels at the arch with the sweet smell. “Where does this hallway go?”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to go there, brother,” said Jed, grabbing me by the shirt neck and hauling me back in line without missing a step.

  Finally the boots stopped at a double-wide door. With another hand scan, it slid open, and our host bowed with his right arm gesturing grandly, “After you, ladies and germs.”

  Jed took my hand firmly as we entered. The lights weren’t as bright and harsh here, and blue carpet softened the floor. The first thing I noticed was a pot of daffodils in the center of a large wooden table with fancy upholstered chairs around it like somebody’s dining room. To our right was a nurses’ station with nobody behind it. On the far side of the daffodil table, pastel striped curtains dangled from steel runners in the ceiling. Some curtains were pulled across to make rooms like in the hospital where we had visited Grum when she broke her wrists. Other curtains were tied back, showing empty beds.

  “My old room,” Jed said, pointing to a bed with steel posts that rose up at the four corners supporting a box-shaped frame overhead. From the steel frame dangled all sorts of pulleys and ropes and a metal triangle like a super-sized coat hanger.

  A woman pulling a white medical jacket on over green hospital clothes came yawning out of a doorway behind the nurses’ station. Her light brown hair was bedraggled, and her cheek had a deep sleep crease. As the door slowly closed behind her, I noticed a tousled bed. Maybe she lived here all the time, like Jed. How many other people did ORC have tucked away living secret lives?

  “Good evening, Dr. Mills. Sorry for the short notice,” said Boots Odum. The woman wiped her eyes and yawned, “S’all right.” After the yawn finished, she said, carefully pronouncing every sound, “I am here to serve, Mr. Odum.”

  “Thank you nevertheless, doctor,” he said. “How is our newest patient?”

  Dr. Mills frowned and glanced toward the closed curtains. “Life signs are stable for now.”

  Boots Odum nodded. I felt Jed’s hand fall lower. His shoulders had slumped. What had deflated him?

  “Hello, Jed,” said the doctor with a big smile in her voice. Water sounds splashed behind the tall counter as she washed her hands. “Good to see you looking spry.”

  “Thanks, doc.” Jed tipped his head to her. “Wouldn’t be here without you.” He turned to Ma. “Dr. Mills is the one who saved my life and fixed my pretzels so I could walk on them.”

  The doctor and Boots Odum exchanged worried glances. “Pretzels!” He chuckled, giving Jed a fond pat on the shoulder. “Your colorful expressions always entertain me, son, but you don’t want to give your family the wrong idea, do you? Pretzels.” He chuckled some more.

  “He doesn’t want Jed to give us the right idea,” Barbie whispered in my ear.

  The doctor looked me up and down
as she came around the counter, snapping purple gloves onto her hands. “You say the boy is already infected?”

  Boots Odum quit chuckling and nodded. “Ingested. And I want the girl scanned, too. Then Mrs. Daniels.”

  The boy. The girl. You’d think he’d figure out our names if he was going to kidnap and scan us and maybe make us disappear from the face of the earth like Jed did for all those months he was being held in secret quarantine.

  “My name is Barbara,” the Shish said. “You can call me Barb. Only my family is allowed to call me Barbie. And this is Sebastian. Everyone calls him Sebby.”

  “Say cheese,” I said, waving toward the ceiling where a video camera pointed straight at us. Then it moved on in a slow circle, capturing the whole room.

  “Pleased to meet you both,” said the doctor, seeming to mean it. She looked really nice when she smiled even though she’d looked like a plain grumpy person when she’d walked out of her sleeping room. “And Mrs. Daniels.” She reached out to shake Ma’s hand. Ma reluctantly brushed fingers with her.

  “Sit down, Claire, and make yourself comfortable,” Boots Odum said with a nod toward the daffodils. “I’ll get the paperwork for you to sign and see if I can rustle us up a cup of coffee while we wait.”

  Ma didn’t sit, though. She stepped between Barbie and me and pulled us close. “Where they go, I go.” I squeezed her arm to thank her. She squeezed back.

  That dahlia bulb nose turned bright red. Obviously Boots Odum didn’t like being contradicted. His lips pressed tight and he said, “The scanning room is designed for the patient and the doctor. Dr. Mills is not going to hurt your kids.”

  “There won’t be any scanning of these precious bodies until you tell us why,” said Ma, locking Barbie and me under her arms. “I’m not letting you do some top secret classified experiment on my kids without knowing what it is! You’re about two inches away from a lawsuit, Boots.”

  Hoo, boy, he didn’t like being called that. He stiffened like an adrified chicken with its mouth open, unable to cluck.

  Just then a jazz riff played in his shirt pocket. He took the phone out and glanced at it before rolling his eyes and tossing his head impatiently. “Look, I’m trying to help you, Claire. I have a lot to do right now, and you’re not making it any easier.” He flipped the ringing phone open as he lifted it to his ear and said irritably, “Yes, what is it?” He stepped away and turned his back to us, carrying on his conversation in hushed tones.

  “It’s fine, Ma,” Jed said gently, touching her arm. “Really. We’re just checking to make sure there isn’t any—anything seriously wrong. It’s like an X-ray or an MRI. It won’t hurt the twins. Believe me, I’ve been scanned plenty of times. Saved my life.” He crossed his heart.

  Boots Odum turned briskly and said, “Doctor, we have a situation developing in Section A. I must trust you to take things from here.” And with not so much as a glance at us, he scanned his hand and took off running down the hall, heels clickety-clacking an urgent beat.

  My stomach flipped when I saw that someone’s hand needed to pass a test to get out an ORC door, not just in. I closed my eyes and prayed we’d be allowed to leave. Never thought I’d be so homesick for the musty air of our teeny tiny house. And Grum. She’d tell these people what’s up and what’s down.

  Dr. Mills’s eyelids fluttered rapidly as she watched the door slide closed, and a vein in her neck pulsed. She put her hand there in a way that made me think of Miss Beverly. “Mrs. Daniels, may I have your permission to scan Barb and Sebby now?”

  Ma nodded numbly. Jed sat her down, and the doctor handed her a clipboard with papers to fill out.

  “Barbara, please wait here until I’m finished with your brother. Sebastian, please follow me.”

  We crossed the infirmary and entered a wide door. The doctor sat at a desk with a control panel and computer monitor over it, built into a wall made of green tinted glass.

  “Before you go into the scanner, Sebby, I need to ask you a few questions,” she said, pulling up a roller stool for me to sit on. She wanted to know all the diseases I’d ever had (none, except colds, chicken pox, and growing pains) and all the bones I’d ever broken (none, except Barbie’s arm once by accident when I jumped on her). Then she asked about everything I’d had to eat or drink for the past few days, how many times I’d gone to the bathroom, and what everything looked like when it came out.

  “Do you want to know about—?” I gave her the universal barf signal.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Tell me about your nausea.”

  I made it as descriptive as possible, kind of hoping to gross her out, but she kept a straight face the whole time. Since I didn’t know how much to trust her, being ORC’s secret quarantine doctor and all, I did leave out a few details. Such as, how the barf raisins looked through the magic glasses. Which I didn’t tell her about borrowing from her boss. Or, where I happened to be when the cookie dough came up. Because I didn’t think it was any of her business that we had an amazing secret tunnel on our property. And I didn’t talk about my adventures with Celery since I didn’t eat or drink her. In fact I wasn’t planning to eat chicken or eggs ever again.

  “Now please remove your clothing,” the doctor said.

  I was afraid of that! “All right, but don’t look.”

  She smiled a little and turned her back. When I said I was ready, Dr. Mills pressed a button. With a ringing sound, the glass wall opened wide. “Step inside, please.”

  The scanner’s insides looked like a fancy shower with lots of doodads and gadgets on the walls and ceiling. “Cool!” I pressed my nose against the glass and made faces.

  “Very attractive,” said Dr. Mills. “Now stand in the middle and hold still, please.” I heard her like she was talking in my ear.

  I did as she asked, and Dr. Mills started the machinery. It sounded kind of like a band playing slow music. Beams of all different colors came at me from every direction, something like the disco ball that sends light bouncing all over the Skate Away, except this light was warm. With my eyes closed I pretended I was at the seashore. Surfing. Uh-oh, wipeout! Dragged in the undercurrent. Up for air just in the nick of time. What happened to the beach? It’s gone—nothing in sight but water water everywhere. And sharks! Aaaahhhh!

  “Sebastian, could you please hold still,” said a voice.

  Whoops, there went my brain making stuff up. I should have pretended I was a rock at the beach. “Sorry, doc,” I said, and smiled apologetically.

  “Oh, my! Could you open your mouth wider, Sebastian? A little more? Yes, and tip your head back. A little to the right. Yes, that’s perfect—hold, please.” The scanning machine clicked and whirred and played some more dance music as colors came beaming out of the light jets into my mouth. It made my eyes cross trying to watch until the doctor asked me a question.

  “Sebby, have you been to the dentist recently?”

  “No, but interesting you should ask. My teeth have been killing me. I didn’t tell you before because my grandmother said it wasn’t a mysterious debilitating illness. She said I was getting my twelve-year molars.”

  “Indeed, you have those and your wisdom teeth.”

  “What? I can’t have my wisdom teeth yet. I’m still a dumb kid.” I knew a little about wisdom teeth because Jed had just gotten his first one shortly before he disappeared.

  “Oh, you’re not dumb,” the doctor said. She kept asking me to pose this way, then that way. It seemed to take forever before she finally said, “Okay, finished,” and the door slid open.

  As I jumped into my clothes I asked, “Doc, what were you looking for? What’s wrong with me? Besides wisdom? It’s my bones, isn’t it. I’ve grown, like, six inches since Thursday.”

  “That is an unusual growth spurt, isn’t it,” she said.

  “Does it have anything to do with the raw cookie dough I shouldn’t have eaten?” I asked. She didn’t respond. “I’d really like to know, doc. They’re my bones.”

  �
�I’m sorry, Sebby, but I’m not at liberty to discuss the situation with you at this time.”

  She escorted me to the seating area and invited Barbie in for a scan. Ma jumped up. “Wait, Dr. Mills—aren’t you going to tell me if my son is all right?”

  Hey, yeah! Maybe the doctor would be at liberty to discuss my situation with the Higher Power of Ma.

  With her hand on the door, the doctor turned to Ma. “Please be patient for a while longer, Mrs. Daniels, while I complete the scans of your daughter and yourself. Mr. Odum will discuss the results with you after we have had a chance to analyze the data.”

  “Stan will discuss it with me? You’re the doctor, aren’t you?”

  Dr. Mills smiled. “Try not to worry, Mrs. Daniels.” Then she made eye contact with Jed and flashed him a quick smile. That must have meant something to him, because he took Ma’s hand and whispered, “It’s okay, Ma, Sebby will be all right.”