The Hole in the Wall

by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  All right, maybe, but completely wiped out from the colored-light attack and posing. I flopped down onto the row of chairs next to Ma and put my head on her lap. As she ran her fingers through my curls I fell into a sound sleep. When I woke up, her lap had slipped out from under me, and Barbie stood over me with her hand across my mouth.

  I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and looked around. Jed stood behind the counter where the doctor had washed her hands. The lights went out, and he said, “Whoops, sorry,” before they came back on. Something in the ceiling beeped. The video camera stopped still, its lens turned upward.

  “Hurry, follow me,” Jed whispered urgently. He crossed the room and pulled aside a set of closed curtains. My chin dropped at what I saw: a wall of cages holding animals like in a pet store. A horned owl sat still as a statue, except it slowly moved its head to follow the motions we made. A Doberman on the bottom row sat frozen like a statue except its skinny tail, which it wagged like crazy when it saw us. All of the animals had wires and tubes hooked up to them, and monitors flashing numbers behind their cages.

  “Isn’t that one of Ma’s chickens?” Barbie said, pointing to what looked like one of Celery’s aunties.

  We both looked accusingly at Jed. The bald spots in his beard reddened. “I’ll explain all that later. No time now. C‘mon, it’s the next bed.”

  Jed closed that curtain and hurried to yank the next curtain aside. And this time I froze with the shock. A cold feeling drained down my neck all the way to my feet.

  “Pa!”

  He was in a hospital bed tipped like a teeter-totter with his head up, his arms still out to the sides like a cheerleader, and his feet poking the sheet at the same angle we’d first spotted his shoes that night outside Jed’s castle. The only thing that moved was his eyes. They flitted around rapidly when he saw us, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  “It’s a hard life, isn’t it Pa,” said Jed.

  “What happened to him?” I didn’t laugh at Jed’s joke that time. My lower lip wouldn’t stop quivering. I took a few small steps toward Pa, my hand out.

  “Pa’s suffering from adrium poisoning, just like in my legs.” Jed spoke very fast, in a hushed voice. “The adrium has spread through his entire body. He’s almost completely paralyzed.”

  “How did he get here?” Barbie asked. Exactly what I wanted to know.

  “Long story,” Jed said. “Tell you later.”

  “He’s like the chickens,” I said. “What happened to him? And them? And you?”

  Jed peeked out around the curtain before answering in a whisper. “Stan hasn’t figured it out yet, but I have, and I’m not telling him or he won’t be able to resist getting his hands on our property. He has connections—and if Ma won’t sell out willingly, he’ll get the courts to force her. Seb, Barbie, we have to work together. I’ll tell you what I know, but you two need to use your brains and be careful what you say. Can you do that?”

  He was shaking me by the shoulder now.

  “Jeez! I know how to keep my mouth shut.” I bit my lips shut to prove it.

  “All right. See, there are microscopic particles of adrium left in the waste slag after extraction from the ores. Those particles want to get back to an adrium vein. It’s like a magnetic force, and very, very powerful. What Stan doesn’t realize is that we have the mother lode on our land. A pure adrium vein. All that leachate water from the gore fights its way onto our property because it’s attracted there. Pa got poisoned because he spent the night passed out in a leachate puddle in the yard.”

  Huh? I didn’t get much of that, but Barbie nodded as he spoke, like she’d already figured it all out too. She said, “And the chickens also soaked up that leachate stuff when they went into their hidey-hole, right?”

  “Right. There’s a lot more to it, but we don’t have time to dawdle. Quick, Seb—how did you get rid of that contaminated dough you ate?”

  But I was still trying to figure out his explanation. “What’s the adrium got to do with Ma and Pa getting into a fight? Do you know how much money Boots offered to buy—”

  Barbie reached out and pinched my lips shut. “It happened in the tunnel behind our henhouse. Sebby heaved up the dough in the big cavern near the wall where you left us the warning letter. He had a petrified, I mean adrified, chicken stuck to him—long story—and the chicken was cured too. All the stuff, the adrium, just flew right out into the walls. That cavern looks like living jewelry when you wear the magic glasses.”

  “I get it! Back to the mother lode . . .” Jed huffed out all his air and rolled his eyes back, looking up at the ceiling. “Oh, crap. Why’d I have to go seal that barrier up so tight? It’s going to take half the night to rip it down. By then Pa could be dead.”

  19

  “Dead?” me and Barbie echoed. The owl hooted on the other side of the curtain. Eerie!

  Jed nodded grimly. “When only part of the body is affected, you can usually live with it. Like me. And Stan—he lived half his life with an adrified hand.”

  “So that’s why he has amazing bionic fingers!”

  “It’s not something he advertises on his billboards, but, yes, Seb. Anyway, different animals have different levels of tolerance. Birds are tough. That owl’s been here longer than I have. Humans aren’t tough. Last week there was a . . . well, an industrial accident. Three guys got soaked. All dead in twenty-four hours. Pa’s not going to make it much longer without some sort of miracle cure.”

  “But—how can ORC get away with that?” I said. “Three guys dead? There wasn’t anything on the news. Grum would have been gabbing our ears off about something like that.”

  Jed checked outside the curtain again. He was getting really nervous, I could tell by the twitching around his eyes. In a low voice I could barely hear, he said, “Look, half the people who work here never go anywhere. Nobody even knows they’re here. It’s as if they don’t exist.”

  Barbie was pacing in arcs around Pa’s bed, biting off her beloved fingernails. “Jed, I know you don’t want Boots Odum to find out about our adrium vein, but this is a matter of life and death! We should tell him about how Sebby lost his dough so he can help us save Pa! And all those poor animals . . .”

  “No way!” I waved my hands across her face. “We can tell him how I lost my raisins instead. On his property.”

  She hit her hand on her head, looking a lot like me for once. Except for the hair. “I knew that,” she said. “That’s a way better idea.” She patted my arm admiringly, for the first time ever. My face got warm and probably had a silly smile on it.

  Jed looked as confused as his explanation had made me. “Raisins . . . huh? What’s this idea?”

  “There’s another place where the miracle cure happens,” I told him. “The Hole in the Wall, where you rescued us tonight. That’s why we went there in the first place, to save Ma’s chickens.”

  “The paint flew out of Sebby’s back there, too,” Barbie added excitedly.

  “Paint out of Sebby’s back . . . ? Oh, never mind. Tell me later. There’s no time to waste. We’re not waiting for Stan.” And Jed started yanking Pa’s cords and tubes out of the wall. This was a job I could get into. I leaped to his aid.

  “What about Ma?” Barbie said, looking out the curtain toward the scanning room door. “We can’t leave without her.”

  Jed said, “Yes, we can. When Ma comes out here, so will Dr. Mills, and Dr. Mills works for Stan. She is not going to let us take Pa out of here without security clearance. There’s no time for that. If we want to save Pa, we’re going to have to leave Ma to take care of herself. Let’s go!”

  “I’m not leaving Ma.” Barbie crossed her arms.

  “Suit yourself,” Jed said, and gestured for me to help him roll Pa’s bed.

  We were almost at the door when a buzzer started ringing from somewhere that sounded like everywhere. A red light blinked overhead, and a voice came over the intercom, “Security Protocol Aegis Shield in effect. Repeat, Security
Protocol Aegis Shield.” Man, oh man, was I scared.

  The door to the scanning room flew open, and Dr. Mills ran out with Ma close behind, looking confused. They practically fell into Pa’s lap.

  “Craig!” cried Ma in a voice that no words could describe. She looked like the shock would have exploded her head if she wasn’t holding her face together with her hands.

  “Busted,” I said, thinking this would be the end of life as I knew it. No more homework, no more church, no more of Ma’s hockey puckburgers—we were all going to disappear in the guts of ORC forever and ever. But Dr. Mills surprised me.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re here to help, Jed. Get your father and the rest of your family out, and I’ll take care of Miss Beverly. Go straight to the Boys of Summer Stadium, and report to Zone Q.”

  “Miss Beverly?” me and Barbie both said as Dr. Mills threw open a door next to her own room. Sure enough, the long-necked Miss Beverly was sitting up in bed looking confused.

  Jed called, “I’m on top of it, doc,” and flashed me and Barbie a crooked grin as he held his hand out to Ma. “Come with us, Ma.”

  “Hey, shouldn’t someone rescue the Dogstars, too?” I asked, feeling pretty proud of myself for figuring it out. “They must be somewhere behind a curtain back here. Right?”

  “Huh?” said Jed. “Who?”

  “The hippies at Zensyl—”

  “Hurry!” cried Dr. Mills.

  At that, our family skating skills came in handy as we raced Pa’s roller bed up the long hallway, dodging the people who were popping out of doorways and archways. Everyone ran as if their lives depended on it. It was dizzy-making chaos, the scariest two minutes of my life. Which was saying a lot, considering the minutes I’d been having lately. I had to hold on hard to my corner of the bed and run along with the tide of people mostly in pajamas as the buzzers and lights blared and the loudspeaker kept repeating the same message over and over, Security Protocol Aegis Shield, Security Protocol Aegis Shield. That meant to evacuate immediately, Jed shouted when Ma asked. It felt like one of those movies where everyone has to jettison out in the pods before the spaceship self-destructs.

  The elevators and the door to the parking ramp were bottlenecked with people waiting to get out with suitcases on wheels, files on hand trucks, and carts loaded with equipment. Someone had jammed a nutty candy bar under the door to keep it propped open, and the security alarm was going crazy. My stomach growled. I eyed the candy bar and started to bend over for it, but Jed yanked me back to attention.

  As soon as we squeezed through, Jed called, “To Pa’s truck!”

  We pushed the bed up the ramp, veering around cars and trucks squealing out of their spots. It seemed that the compound went on for acres, maybe even a mile, underneath the ground. The place was like an iceberg, and the Onion top was only the tip of it.

  After an eternity we got to the truck and loaded Pa into the back, leaving the hospital bed in the next empty space. Nobody even made any jokes about how ridiculous he looked in his hospital johnny, like we would have if we weren’t all in a terrified panic. Ma climbed in back with me and Pa while Barbie jumped into the front with Jed. He fished the keys out of his pocket, honked the horn, and butted out into the line of traffic. He kept honking and scooting around other cars that were backing out, forcing the truck’s way up and out of the Onion.

  At the exit a security goon waved traffic along toward town, but instead Jed veered toward our side of the gore. “This isn’t the way to the stadium!” Ma cried. “The doctor told us to meet her at Zone Q! What does your brother think he’s doing?”

  “Saving Pa’s life,” I said, holding on tight to the side of the truck. We were bumping along Odum’s Gash like bobsled racers. Jed leaned intently over the steering wheel. Driving couldn’t have been easy for him with his stiff leg braces. Every few seconds he checked the rearview mirror. I kept looking all around, watching for goons, but nobody was following us.

  “Seb, it’s time you told me what’s been going on,” Ma said sternly. And so I told her. Just about everything. Well, maybe not everything. But enough to satisfy her, while not getting me grounded in the next life. Until the truck bounced to a stop at the Hole in the Wall.

  The oasis looked different now. So much for the bright, moonlit sky. Clouds had covered our world again. The dark outlines of living trees stuck out of the mudslide. No longer did the trees dangle upside down from the cliff above. They had slid down to the ground and been buried, mostly, with a few roots sticking out here and there like creepy zombie hands in a cemetery.

  Jed left the headlights shining into the cave and hopped out to open the tailgate. “We have to hurry. If the adrium containment shield blows, it’ll take the whole gore with it.”

  We each took an arm or a leg, all four of us—Ma, Barbie, Jed, me—and carried Pa inside. Talk about heavy as a rock! Jed said Pa probably wasn’t much heavier than normal, though. “He just feels that way because he’s deadweight.”

  “Ooh, deadweight,” said Ma. “I think that adrium stuff twisted your sense of humor.”

  “I take offense at that, Ma,” said Jed. “My sense of humor has always been twisted.”

  The chickens clucked and gathered around, expecting hand-outs of grain, but all they got was Pa plunked down with a THUD. “Here you go, ladies,” I said, rubbing my hands and making Ma laugh nervously as she adjusted Pa’s johnny to cover his sprawled legs.

  “I still can’t believe what you told me on the way over here, Seb,” she said. “Colors flying out of chickens into rock walls. It sounds like some fantasy out of a children’s book!”

  “How long does this take, anyway?” Jed said, looking warily down at Pa.

  “The chickens only took a few minutes,” I said. “Do you feel anything?”

  Jed looked down at his legs and smirked. “You know, I didn’t even think of that!”

  “You could see if anything’s happening if you had the magic glasses on,” Barbie said.

  “Dang!” I said, feeling my pockets. “I lost them.”

  “They must still be here somewhere,” Barbie said. Both of us got on our knees and felt around in the blankets where we had gone to sleep just a few hours ago.

  “So that’s where Grum’s quilt went,” said Ma.

  “Aha, here we go.” I found the glasses and handed them to Ma.

  She put them on and made the predictable noises. “Incredible. The stone is alive.” Then she stared intently at Pa. I couldn’t tell whether she was hoping he’d come back to life, or hoping he wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure what I thought about that myself. And then I felt bad for not being sure. You shouldn’t want your father to die, should you? But I couldn’t help but think it would solve a lot of problems. Then he wouldn’t have to decide to stay or go, to change or not change. We wouldn’t have to be scared of his temper anymore.

  “Do you see any colors swirling out of him, Ma?” Barbie asked. Ma shook her head no and handed Jed the glasses. He gaped all around at the cave walls and tipped his head back to examine the ceiling. “Wow, this place is gorgeous. No wonder Stan couldn’t bear to mine his childhood getaway.”

  “Huh?” I said. “What do you mean, his childhood getaway?! I mean, I know he owns the property, technically, but . . . but . . . ,” I sputtered. Everyone was giving me strange looks.

  “Seb, this cave belonged to Stan before you were even a glint in Pa’s eye,” Jed said. “If not for this cave, Grum would probably still be living in the gore and Stan Odum would probably be a starving artist next door. He used to hang out here as a kid. The walls would sometimes seem to blink colors at him, and he became a scientist just to figure out the cause. That’s why he started ORC. He believes that the power of adrium could fuel distant space travel, if it can be controlled. There are exciting possibilities for adrium as a clean source of energy. At the very least it would have many uses in industry, medicine, defense, you name it. Anyway, this was Stan’s secret place first.”

  “Oh,” I sa
id.

  Jed started pacing around, jostling elbows with everyone in the small area of the cave. He hit his head on the ceiling and rubbed it. “Shoot! Shouldn’t something have happened to Pa now?”

  “He’s not a chicken,” I said.

  “That’s for sure,” Jed said. “He’ll fight with anyone.”

  But for once I wasn’t joking. “That’s not what I mean! The adrium flew out of the chickens quickly, but it didn’t leave my back right away. I don’t really even know when it happened.”

  “Sometime after I scratched your back,” Barbie said. “Remember how itchy it was?”

  Jed nodded along with me. “Itching is one of the early symptoms of adrification. My legs itched so much when I first woke up, I used to reach down my casts with chopsticks to scratch. When Dr. Mills caught me, she took away my chopsticks and gave me a turkey baster to squirt air instead. After the casts came off she gave me heating pads. That really made the stiffness and pain feel better.”