The Hole in the Wall

by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  “Can’t say I am. But if the explosion takes out this whole solid ridge, then we wouldn’t have been any better off going in the other direction, either. Let’s find out what’s going on.”

  At that he reached into the side pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out something that looked like a cell phone. He flipped it open and pressed a button. I leaned over his arm to look. It was a miniature computer, with a screen lighting up on one side and a digital keyboard on the other. After a moment the screen filled with tiny symbols streaming along.

  “What the heck? How can you read that?”

  Jed put something over his eyes that looked like swim goggles with green lenses. He grinned like Boots Odum.

  “Yikes! You look like an insect,” said Barbie.

  “No, a space alien,” I said. Those lenses fit perfectly over Jed’s eyes. They were the exact same size and shape.

  “Cool! Can I see?”

  Jed handed me the goggles. Excitedly I pulled the strap around my head, but the lenses only covered the outside corners of my eyes. “I can’t see anything. What the heck?” They were just green. Like a blank chalkboard.

  Jed took the goggles back and put them on. “Custom made for my eyes only. Stan invented the technology. Calls it the Little Genius System. Top secret stuff. Don’t tell him I showed you, or he’ll have to kill me.”

  He turned his face toward the computer again. The symbols on the keyboard blinked rapidly, as if invisible fingers were typing a hundred words a minute, and then suddenly the text disappeared, replaced by images of landforms—North America, the U.S., and then a big dark triangle shape sunk deep into the rolling hills, with something round blinking in the middle like a dim mood lamp.

  “The gore!” I said.

  Barbie leaned over me leaning over Jed and grabbed the computer to see. Then she looked out over the actual gore and said, “Amazing.”

  There were still a few vehicles emerging from the Onion, heavy equipment mostly, looking like Tonka toys. Jed moved the satellite image over toward town, and we saw a traffic jam of vehicles from Main Street Kokadjo packing the highway toward Exton. All the vehicles were headed that way, even in the breakdown lanes, except for one of ORC’s security Hummers. That was stuck in front of Skate Away trying to get through the opposite way, heading to the edge of town.

  A little way past the traffic jam, at the bottom of Kettle Ridge, a huge dump truck from the strip mine had been parked to block the road. After that the pavement made an empty black ribbon until the very top, where one lonely red pickup sat overlooking the gore. Jed zoomed the image in on Stupid. I mean Fluffly Kitty. He had jumped out the window and was now sitting on the hood like a gargoyle.

  “Cool!” I said. “Hey, can we look at the commune?” Maybe we’d find some clue about why the Dogstars left Zensylvania in Odum’s hands so suddenly.

  “Not now,” he said. “There’s something else I need to check out first.” And he whizzed the image straight over to the Boys of Summer Stadium. Its parking lots were full, but the field and the stands were empty.

  “That’s weird,” said Barbie. “Where did all the people go?”

  “Where do you think?” said Jed, as if it should be obvious.

  “To buy hot dogs?” I said.

  “That’s outrageous,” said Barbie.

  “Then they must have beamed up into the government’s secret starship.”

  Jed laughed and tousled my hair. “I missed you even more than Fluffy Kitty, bro. No, everyone’s gone to the bomb shelters underground.”

  “Oh,” me and Barbie both said. Hers was the oh, of course kind and mine was oh, is that all. Sometimes the truth is pretty boring.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why a little podunk town like Kokadjo got a stadium? Sure, people come from all over the county for the games and concerts, but the real reason Stan had the stadium built was to have an emergency evacuation site for ORC. Adrium is too volatile to handle without major precautions. And all his computer servers are backed up at an underground lab there. All his technology, all his research. The walls are so thick, everyone and everything down there could survive any disaster.”

  “Then why didn’t we go there like everyone else?” squealed Barbie, punching Jed’s arm.

  “Because when this is all over, sis, everyone else there will be able to go home and live happily ever after. But not us. The whole Daniels family will be stuck in Zone Q until Stan says we can leave.”

  “Q for quarantine!” I said.

  “You got it, bro. And I’ve had enough of it. I’m betting that Stan knows adrium doesn’t spread from person to person. What he doesn’t want to spread is the truth about what’s going on at ORC. Most of the people who work there don’t even know.”

  Jed’s computer keyboard blinked some more, and the symbols came flooding back onto the screen, too tiny for me to see.

  “Yep, that’s what I was afraid of,” Jed said.

  “What?!” I said.

  “Those goons stuck in traffic down on Main Street? Stan sent them after us. He’s not too pleased that we didn’t show up.”

  “He’s not the only one,” Barbie said, pointing.

  A car was squealing wheels around the corner of the kettle, headlights on high. An overloaded SUV, to be exact.

  Ma pulled up beside us and jumped out. The SUV kept shaking, though. The good ol’ jackhammer was sound asleep among the garbage bags. Grum stayed in the passenger seat, jawing her dentures. We hopped out of the truck.

  Ma hugged us and then started hollering at us. “Thank goodness you’re safe! But I’ve had enough of you kids giving me the slip. You could have told me where you wanted to go, you know. Instead you . . . and then . . . all the streets are one way, and that’s O-U-T, out! Do you realize how difficult it was to convince the police to let me past the road blockade? I told them—oh dear God! Heaven help us!”

  She’d finally caught sight of the glowing Onion below. She paused to gape.

  The music of the spheres had grown louder, the perfume smell stronger. The air prickled with some kind of energy. Or maybe it was just my nerves.

  Then that old song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” started blasting from Jed’s leg. He pulled out his pocket computer. I ran over to see. The screen was lit up and all of a sudden we were looking inside some kind of office filled with computer screens and consoles with gizmos, and the backs of about ten heads.

  “Sorry, guys. You aren’t supposed to see this,” Jed said, turning his back to us. Me and Barbie kept a polite distance, but I wriggled my head under his arm so I could look at the computer screen.

  “Hey, Stan,” Jed said. “You rang?”

  Suddenly the image changed to all face, mostly dahlia bulb. Red. “Jed! Where the fantod are you, son? I need you here pronto!”

  Jed put his hand over my face and pushed me out of sight. But I could still hear.

  “Sorry, my friend, no can do,” Jed said. “It’s my day off. I’m spending some quality time with the family.”

  “Look, you know I can’t leave you out there running loose. This is an evacuation. You know the risks. You know where you need to be.”

  “I know where you want me,” Jed said, “but my family has to come first. I’m sure you can understand that.”

  “Of course I can. That’s why you have to get them to the stadium, ASAP, for their own good.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “You know the containment field has been breached. This is the only place I can guarantee their safety, son.”

  “And after the dust has settled, you’ll let us go home?”

  Boots Odum didn’t answer right away.

  “That’s what I thought. Don’t worry, we can take care of ourselves, Stan. I’ll let you get back to work now. We’ll catch up another time. Peace out.”

  “Jed! Wait! Please. Listen to me. That little brother of yours had enough adrium in his system to cause accelerated bone growth, and yet there’s not a trace of the element remaining i
n his body. He’s been cured somehow! He must be studied!”

  Woo-hoo! I was cured! I looked up at the starless sky and punched a Yes! to the Big Guy.

  “Look, Jed, I don’t have time to dillydally. You want to continue putting yourself and your father at risk, fine. But you aren’t the only ones who need that cure.”

  “Is that really all you want from us, Stan? To find the cure?”

  Odum paused before saying in a high voice, “Of course!”

  I didn’t believe him. If I’d thought about it, I might not have done what I did next. But I am who I am, so I grabbed Jed’s computer and told Boot’s Odum’s nose, “Liar! You want to steal our land!”

  “Seb!” Jed put his hand over my mouth with one hand and took back the computer with the other. “Sorry about that, Stan. He’s a little impulsive.” He turned his head away from the computer and winked at me before continuing.

  “If all you want is the cure, Stan, then I’ll be glad to tell you. But first you have to promise you’ll leave us alone.”

  “What? Son, you know I can’t in good conscience leave you alone! There has to be a controlled research study. I’ll have to examine you folks after this is all over. For heaven’s sake, tell me what you know. My mother is—”

  But his sentence got cut off by Ma snatching the phone. “Stan, Jed is not your son. You don’t get to tell him what to do. And you know very well what he means. No more of your secret quarantine business. We’ll be happy to help you with your precious research, but we’ll come and go as we please. And we won’t be selling our land to you, either. Unless of course your little unnatural disaster tonight destroys it. In which case I’ll send you the bill.”

  Just then the siren from town grew louder. The Hummer must have made it through the traffic. It was blaring its way up Kettle Ridge!

  Jed grabbed the phone back. “Oh, one more thing, Stan—call off your men. Now! We’re not going anywhere with them. Deal or no deal?”

  “All right, all right!” Odum cried. “I don’t have time to waste! Deal! What’s the cure?”

  “Just go to an adrium vein like the one where we found the twins tonight, apply heat to the adrified area, and the infection will be drawn from the body. Like mag—”

  The computer screen went blank. Suddenly the sky filled with flashes of color. Sounds struck the air like an orchestra during the grand finale. I felt vibrations in my bones. We all looked out over the gore with fear and awe.

  21

  Grum appeared at my side and gripped my arm so hard, I thought it might drop right off like a pruned branch. Over her own glasses she had propped the cracked magic glasses. Ma must have given them to her.

  “Dear God, it’s the second coming,” she said. “Everybody repent your sins and get right with the Lord while you still have a chance!”

  “You may be right,” said Ma, getting a couple of lawn chairs out of the trunk for her and Grum. They sat, leaned their heads together, and started praying.

  I stopped listening. Words didn’t mean anything. I was so awed. The most vivid bursts of every color I’d ever seen were flying up into the sky from all around the Onion. You didn’t even need magic glasses to see them. Colors whirling around in circles, then swooping down into the ground. The air smelled so sweet, I almost couldn’t bear to breathe. The music sounded like all the noises of the woods and the ocean—yet, just wind.

  The mined gore dirt started throbbing with those same swirling patterns we’d seen on the cuckoo wall and my tattoo, spreading out and out from where the colors landed, all the way to the fence of boulders that bordered the gore. It seemed that the colors were rushing along like water in rapids, whirling and spinning down into the earth. Down and down. The loose soil was actually sinking deep and hardening into swirls. I sure wished I could tell what was happening at the Hole in the Wall, but it was impossible to see. I felt sad about losing that place.

  “Cowabunga,” a deep voice said behind us. It made me jump out of my sadness.

  “Dude,” said another.

  I turned to stare up at two of the biggest guys I’d ever seen who weren’t on TV wrestling. Odum’s goons had arrived. They looked more like twins than me and Barbie. Both wore gray uniforms and phone earpieces, and they both had on the pearly magic glasses. Those guys looked even more amazed than the rest of us, which gave me an idea.

  “Excuse me, Sir, can I borrow your glasses for a second?”

  “Sebastian!” said Grum, shaking my elbow. “Say may I.”

  “May I?”

  Goon One and Goon Two shrugged at each other. “The Chief said be nice to these folks,” Goon One said, and Goon Two replied, “What can it hurt? Let the kids have some fun.” So they handed their glasses over to me and Barbie, then turned around to talk to the voices inside their ears.

  The magic glasses made the colors in the gore even more intense, like in the adrium mother lode. They also showed me something I hadn’t noticed before, a swirl of colors flying up toward Kettle Ridge like a swarm of butterflies. It was pretty incredible. I watched the adrium swarm approach until suddenly Jed let out a yelp and fell onto his back. He rolled over and clawed at the weeds that dotted the roadside, yet somehow he was sliding backward, toward the gore, his fingers scraping the ground.

  “Heeellllp!” he howled.

  And then I realized what was happening: the adrium inside his legs was dragging him! Like Celery and the rock had flown me! I leaned down to grab Jed’s hands and pulled as hard as I could. Ma’s arms went around my waist and she pulled on me. But the adrium was too strong for us. Jed’s hands slipped free, and I tumbled to the ground with Ma.

  When I hopped back to my feet and wiped the dirt out of my eyes, Jed was belly up to the guardrail, his legs beneath it poking into the gore, with Barbie holding him by his belt. I was terrified he’d get yanked in. Why weren’t those big goons trying to help, for Pete’s sake? They were still turned around talking on their ear phones, that’s why, with their fingers in their free ears to block out all the noise.

  I ran at them flailing and screaming to get their attention. When they turned and saw what was happening to Jed, they immediately lunged to the rescue. They each took an arm, dug in their heels, and held him back.

  Then I leaned over the edge for a closer look at Jed’s predicament. He was so terrified, his mouth was frozen open without any scream coming out. But his legs were—amazing! Sticking straight out into the air, with colors swirling all around them! The adrium in his legs was leaving to join the swarm.

  Pretty soon Jed’s screaming transformed into a goofy grin. His knees flopped and he dangled his legs over the edge, kicking his feet like he was sitting on a dock splashing in the water.

  “Thanks, fellas, I think you can let go now.”

  “No problem,” the goons said, and stepped back. Grum applauded. “Well done, boys.” Barbie and Ma clapped, too. I wolf whistled.

  Jed pulled his legs out from under the guardrail and leaned his back against it with a deep breath. Then he grinned down at his braces. Slowly he unbuckled them and set them aside. Then he crisscrossed his legs and slowly wobbled to his feet.

  Ma ran to put her arm around him. “Let’s get you away from that edge, huh?”

  He took a step forward and his legs folded under him. So he was back on the ground, but still goofy grinning.

  Ma smiled, too. “My baby’s learning to walk.”

  I reached out to give Jed a hand. “C’mon, you big baby.” Barbie took his other hand. We yanked him up again, and this time he stood firm.

  He took one step, then another. We let him go.

  “How do you feel?” Ma asked.

  “So glad I didn’t let Stan give me bionic legs,” Jed said through his grin. He just couldn’t stop grinning. He walked all the way to the SUV and sat on the bumper, rubbing his thighs. The SUV was still vibrating with Pa’s snores.

  Pa!

  How could he have slept through all this? After all he’d been through, he must be ex
hausted. But I couldn’t let him snooze away this chance to be cured like Jed! I ran to the door and slid it open.

  Pa fell straight out onto the ground in a backward somersault, as if he’d been leaning hard against the door. “What the . . . ” He yelled all the usual cusses. But I didn’t care what he called me. I just cared that a bunch of colors came butter-flying out along with him. It was like they’d been waiting at the door. They circled away and disappeared over the edge of the cliff.

  Pa’s eyes just about filled his face, he looked so surprised. He stopped hollering and hopped to his feet with a big smile. He did a squat and then a lunge and then started lifting me by the waist to put me on his shoulders, like he used to when I was little. Except I was almost as tall as him now, and he couldn’t lift me.