by Dan Gutman
The
GENius
Files
MISSION
UNSTOPPABLE
Dan Gutman
To Liza Voges
Thanks to Edward Cheslek, Robert Jones, Nina Wallace, Lucy Trotta, Jerry Trotta, Linda Clover, and of course Google Maps.
“Do stupid stuff, and even stupider stuff
will happen to you.”
—Nobody said this. But somebody should have.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - Coke and Pepsi
Chapter 2 - Over the Cliff
Chapter 3 - Flying
Chapter 4 - Home Sweet Home
Chapter 5 - Dr. Herman Warsaw and The Genius Files
Chapter 6 - Detention
Chapter 7 - The Science of Fire
Chapter 8 - In or Out
Chapter 9 - Welcome to the Family
Chapter 10 - Manifest Destiny
Chapter 11 - On the Road
Chapter 12 - Ups and Downs
Chapter 13 - The Second Cipher
Chapter 14 - The Singing Sand
Chapter 15 - I'll Be Watching You
Chapter 16 - Dads Gone Wild
Chapter 17 - An Extremely Large Ball of Twine
Chapter 18 - SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM
Chapter 19 - Process of Elimination
Chapter 20 - Grounded
Chapter 21 - A Wrong Turn
Chapter 22 - A Magical Night
Chapter 23 - The House on the Rock
Chapter 24 - The Infinity Room
Chapter 25 - Kids Today
Epilogue
Don’t Miss The Genius Files
About the Author
Also by Dan Gutman
Copyright
About the Publisher
To the Reader . . .
All the places mentioned in this book are real. You can visit them. You should visit them!
Chapter 1
Coke and Pepsi
There were ten items on Coke McDonald’s to-do list on June 17, but JUMP OFF A CLIFF was not one of them.
CLEAN OUT MY LOCKER was on the list.
PICK UP MY YEARBOOK was on the list.
GET BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR PEP was on the list.
PACK FOR SUMMER VACATION was on the list.
But nothing about jumping off a cliff.
And yet, oddly enough, jumping off a cliff was the one thing that Coke McDonald was actually going To Do on June 17.
Not only was he going to jump off a cliff, but first he was going to push his twin sister, Pepsi.
Now, before we get to the cliff-jumping part of the story, maybe I’d better explain something. Why would anyone in their right mind name their children Coke and Pepsi?
It was probably because Dr. Benjamin McDonald and his lovely wife, Bridget, weren’t in their right minds when the twins were born almost thirteen years earlier. For one thing, the McDonalds didn’t know they would be having twins until after Coke entered the world. The doctors and nurses had pretty much taken off their latex gloves and called it a day when Mrs. McDonald informed them that she felt a funny feeling deep inside—as if she wasn’t quite finished. And, lo and behold, she was absolutely right! The doctors and nurses went back to work; and the next thing anybody knew, out popped a bouncing baby girl.
Surprise!
From the start, the McDonalds had decided to name their son Coke. Not because of the soft drink. Because of coal. According to Dictionary.com, coke is “the solid product resulting from the destructive distillation of coal in an oven or closed chamber or by imperfect combustion, consisting principally of carbon.”
Go ahead and look it up if you don’t believe me. I’ll wait.
Okay, did you look it up? Good.
Dr. McDonald, a history professor at San Francisco State University, had written a scholarly book about coal’s impact on the Industrial Revolution. He always thought Coke would make a good name for a boy. It’s short, sweet. It has that hard K sound. Like Kodak. Katmandu. Kalamazoo.
When Coke’s twin sister popped out, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald were faced with a dilemma. Once you name your firstborn son Coke, you can’t very well name his twin sister Rachel or Emily or anything too normal. It wouldn’t sound right.
“How about Pepsi?” one of the attending nurses suggested as a joke. “Coke and Pepsi.”
Everyone in the birthing room had a good old laugh over that. But the more the McDonalds thought about it, the more they liked the idea. Coke and Pepsi! It was perfect!
Not only that, but it fit their sensibilities. The McDonalds were second-generation hippies from San Francisco who had always disapproved of the rampant commercialization of society. Dr. McDonald was fond of telling his students that the average person living in a city sees up to five thousand advertisements every day. Five thousand ads! What better way to stick it to The Man than to name your kids Coke and Pepsi? It would be an ironic statement about how corporations control people’s lives.
Heck, their last name was already McDonald. Why not name the kids Coke and Pepsi?
Naturally, when the local media picked up on the baby names, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies were not happy at first. They made some noises about suing the family. Giving babies the same names as popular soft drinks was an infringement of the companies’ copyrights, the lawyers grumbled. (Yeah, as if consumers would confuse the infants with sugary carbonated beverages.)
In the end, the corporate giants decided that kids named Coke and Pepsi would be the best advertising they would ever have. And it didn’t cost them a dime. This, they agreed, was even better than having kids named Jimmy and Suzy walk around wearing Coke and Pepsi T-shirts.
Of course, growing up with the names Coke and Pepsi can be tough, especially in middle school. Both of the twins encountered a good deal of ribbing when they got to sixth grade, especially Pepsi.
“Hey, soda girl! You’re flat!”
But the thing is, no matter how unusual someone’s name is, after you hear it a few dozen times, the name starts to fit the person, like a comfortable pair of jeans. You can’t imagine that boy or girl ever having a different name. Eventually, kids stopped looking at Pepsi and thinking of high-fructose corn syrup. We humans have a way of adapting to things.
Hardly anybody called her Pepsi, anyway. To most of the kids at West Marin Middle School and just about everybody who knew her, she was Pep. Simply Pep.
Anyway, it could have been worse. The McDonalds could have named the twins Mountain Dew and Sprite. A few years back there was a New Jersey couple who named their son Adolf Hitler. Go ahead and look it up if you don’t believe me.
Now that kid is going to have issues.
Ordinarily in a story, this is where the author tells the readers what the main character—or, in this case, characters—look like. The author might go on for page after page, painting a glorious word picture of Coke’s and Pep’s hair, their faces, the way they walk and talk, the way they dress, and so on.
But you know what? Who cares? Do you really care what Coke and Pep look like? Does it really matter to you? It’s boring. By the time you get to Chapter Three, you will have forgotten the description you read back in Chapter One, anyway. Coke and Pep are twelve-year-old twins, about to turn thirteen in a week. Okay? Nuff said. That’s all you need to know right now.
You really want to know what they look like? Look at the cover of this book. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Okay, now that we got that out of the way, let’s move on to the good part—the part where Coke and Pep go over the cliff.
Chapter 2
Over the Cliff
West Marin Middle School sits nestled on a ridge high up in the hill
s in Point Reyes Station, California. The town’s about thirty miles north of San Francisco and very close to Mount Wittenberg, which towers 1,407 feet above the Pacific Ocean. On a clear day, you can be in the school playground and see nearly forty miles. The weather is almost always beautiful. And on this particular day, it was so beautiful that the McDonald twins decided to ditch the school bus and walk home to their house down by the beach. It would be a long hike, but it was downhill all the way.
“I should call Mom and Dad on my cell and tell them so they won’t worry,” Pep suggested.
“We’ll be home soon,” Coke replied. “Don’t bother.”
The twins talked about their upcoming summer vacation. The whole family would be driving cross-country, all the way to Washington, D.C., where the twins’ aunt Judy would be getting married on the Fourth of July.
Neither of the twins was particularly excited about the trip. Sitting in a recreational vehicle for two months wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good time. They’d have to celebrate their birthday—June 25—in an RV. It was probably going to be the worst summer of their lives, Coke guessed.
The twins hadn’t gone far when Pep turned to her brother anxiously.
“Y’know, I have a feeling that somebody’s following us,” she said quietly.
Both twins turned around to look behind them. Nobody was there.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Coke said. “Why would somebody want to follow us?”
“I don’t know!” Pep said defensively. “I just have this feeling.”
“You and your feelings.”
Feelings. Like a lot of boys, the whole concept of feelings was lost on Coke. He never understood when people would talk about feelings. What are feelings, anyway? You feel something when you touch it. When you can hold it in your hand. Things exist in the real world, or they don’t. Something happens, or it doesn’t. According to Coke, there was no such thing as feelings.
They had walked a few hundred feet down the road when Pep started to pick up the pace.
“Will you slow down?” her brother said, annoyed. “It’s not a race. What’s the rush?”
“There’s somebody behind us,” Pep told him. “Don’t turn around!”
“Well, how do you expect me to see if there’s somebody behind us if I don’t turn around?” he replied.
There was indeed somebody behind them, off in the distance. It was a man driving a golf cart. He was wearing a black hat and a black suit.
“See him?” Pep asked.
“So what?” Coke said. “It’s a public road. People are allowed on it. He isn’t bothering anybody. Maybe he lost a golf ball.”
“There’s no golf course within miles of here!” Pep insisted, walking even faster. “Why is he riding in a golf cart? And why would a golfer wear a suit and tie?”
“Maybe he’s disabled,” Coke replied. “He needs the cart to get around.”
“And maybe he’s a murderer.”
“Murderers don’t drive golf carts!”
“I’m worried,” Pep whispered.
“You’re always worried.”
Which was true. Pep was always worried about something. At the least little thing—a hangnail, a creaking sound, a runny nose—Pep would fuss and fret and always expect the worst.
Coke turned his head just enough to conclude that the golf cart was getting closer. He may not have been able to feel feelings himself, but he knew his sister. She was a worrier, but she wasn’t paranoid. Sometimes it seemed as though she had a sixth sense about certain things. Coke broke into a slow jog just to be on the safe side, and Pep did the same.
They turned off the road to the left and took the dirt path that went closer to the cliff that lined the road. Common sense said that the guy in the golf cart would stay on the paved road and continue on his merry way.
But common sense wasn’t in the cards on this day. When the twins turned around to peek behind them again, they saw that the golf cart had veered onto the dirt path. Somebody was on their tail. He was definitely wearing a black suit, and his hat was one of those old-time bowlers.
“Why is that dude in the bowler hat following us?” Pep asked, a frightened look on her face.
“How should I know?” Coke replied. “Come on, run!”
Their backpacks bopped up and down as they dashed along the edge of the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The path narrowed, but it was still wide enough for a golf cart to ride on.
The twins ran along the cliff walk until they reached a couple of little wooden shacks. The buildings looked like outhouses, but in fact they were used to store equipment for fighting forest fires.
“Let’s hide here,” Coke said, pulling Pep behind one of the buildings. “That bowler dude will pass right by.”
“And what if he doesn’t?” she asked, breathing heavily.
“I didn’t take five years of karate for nothing,” Coke replied, lifting his right foot. “This is a deadly weapon. I can kill a man with it if I have to. And I know exactly how to do it, too.”
Pep remembered the last fight Coke was in, just before he earned his black belt. He’d lost to a kid who was blind. Coke only had one move: a spinning kick that he called the Inflictor. It looked cool but didn’t fool anybody. Pep was about to make fun of her brother’s lame martial arts skills; but before she could get out a word, a hand clapped tightly over each of their mouths from behind.
“Don’t scream,” a woman’s voice warned. “Your lives are in danger!”
Coke struggled to turn around, but the woman’s elbow was pressed against his chest. From the corner of his eye, he could make out that she had dark hair and was dressed in bright red.
“Who are you?” Pep muttered through the fingers clamped to her face.
“My name is Mya,” the woman said in an unidentifiable accent. “I am a friend. You need to trust me.”
“Why?” Coke said, ripping the hand off his face. “Why should we trust you? You’re a complete stranger.”
“Because I’m about to save your lives.”
“Some dude in a bowler hat is chasing us in a golf cart,” Pep told Mya.
“I know.”
Mya let the twins go and unzipped the large purse that hung from her shoulder. She reached into the handbag and pulled out a yellow Frisbee.
“You’re going to save our lives by throwing a Frisbee at that guy?” Coke said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Watch and learn,” Mya said.
The golf cart was electric and didn’t make much noise, but the twins could hear it crunching along the gravel path as it got closer. Suddenly, Mya leaped out from behind the shed, got into position, and whipped the Frisbee thirty yards down the path. It was almost comical—a woman in a red jumpsuit trying to stop a golf cart with a Frisbee. But nobody was laughing.
A tree branch hung over the path, making it impossible to throw anything in a straight line and hit the golf cart. But apparently Mya had thought of that. She flung the disk in such a way that it skipped off the ground once about ten feet in front of the cart and then rose the rest of the way, striking the cart on its right front tire.
There was a loud bang and a plume of smoke; and the front of the golf cart flipped up and backward. Through the smoke the twins could see the man flying out of the cart and over the bushes on the right. The golf cart landed upside down with a thunk.
“That was cool!” Coke gushed. “What was it?”
“A Frisbee grenade,” Mya explained calmly, zipping up her bag once again.
“Where can I get one?” Coke asked.
“They’re not for sale.”
“Is that bowler dude going to be all right?” Pep asked.
“You don’t want him to be all right,” Mya replied. “He was trying to kill you.”
“Wait a minute,” Coke said, still fascinated by the Frisbee grenade. “If that thing had an explosive charge in it, why didn’t it explode when it skipped off the ground?”
“It was programmed to deto
nate upon the second impact, not the first,” Mya explained.
“But how did you know you were going to skip it off the ground?” Pep asked.
“There’s no time for questions now!” Mya barked, pulling open the door to the little shack next to them. “That minor obstacle will only slow them down. Quickly! Take off those backpacks. I need you to put these on!”
She took out two large outfits that looked like oversized silk pajamas. One was yellow, and the other was red. Both were made of a smooth, synthetic material.
“What is this, bulletproof or something?” asked Pep as Mya handed her the yellow one.
“No, it’s a wingsuit,” Mya explained. “Quickly! Put it on!”
“Why should we listen to you?” Coke asked. “Who are you, our mother?”
Mya grabbed him around the neck.
“No, but I just saved your lives,” she told him. “And I’m going to save you again . . . if you’ll let me.”
Ever since they were old enough to go outside on their own, the twins had been warned not to talk to strangers. Not to take candy from strangers. Not to get into a stranger’s car under any circumstances. But nobody ever told them not to put on a wingsuit given to them by a stranger.
Pep threw off her backpack and rushed to stick her feet into the legs of the funny-looking suit. Coke, seeing her, reluctantly took off his backpack, too. He pulled on the red suit and zipped it up in the front.
There was one big difference between these wingsuits and a pair of pajamas: A foot or more of material had been sewn between each elbow and hip, and also between the legs.