Mission Unstoppable

by Dan Gutman

  “Not mine,” Coke groaned.

  His dad opened the shades to let in some light and to try to wake up the kids. Then he went outside and finished packing the RV, carefully going through his checklist to make sure he didn’t forget anything essential: extra water, flashlights, jumper cables, road flares, first aid kit, pens and paper, trash bags, camera, and so on. Mrs. McDonald busied herself with food, filling the little RV refrigerator and emptying the one at home. A carton of milk left in a fridge for two months would not be a pretty sight when they got back.

  Coke threw his iPod, cell phone charger, and a few books into his backpack. He was ready to go. Pep was a different story. In the last few months, she had started to care—for the first time—about her personal appearance. Suddenly, she was spending hours straightening her hair in the mirror and agonizing over what she should wear. Coke teased his sister as she smeared a mysterious substance she called “foundation” on her face to cover up a few pimples that nobody would ever notice in a million years. Some days she even put on nail polish or lip gloss.

  “You’re still ugly,” Coke remarked as his sister examined herself. “It’s genetic.” He liked teasing her about her looks, as they looked almost exactly alike.

  “Let’s go!” Dr. McDonald shouted urgently. “The open road awaits us! We’ve got to get through California today!”

  Pep stuffed her hair-straightening iron into her backpack. As an afterthought, Coke grabbed the Frisbee and deck of cards that Bones had given them. There would be time to kill on the road. Even if his sister couldn’t throw a Frisbee, he might meet somebody who could.

  Mrs. McDonald had prepared bagels for the kids to eat on the road. She didn’t want to wait another half hour for them to eat a proper breakfast at home.

  Finally, everyone piled into the RV, grown-ups in the front seats, kids in the back.

  “Take a deep breath, everybody,” Dr. McDonald said, closing his eyes. “Can you smell it? Can you taste it?”

  “Taste what, Dad?” Coke asked.

  “Fresh air,” his father replied. “If we were taking this trip by plane, we’d be breathing stale, recycled air.”

  “We’d also be in Washington a few hours from now,” Coke said.

  “I thought recycling was a good thing, Dad,” Pep commented.

  “Not recycled air,” her father replied. “You kids need to get back to nature. It used to be that children would explore, learn, and become part of their world. But now they just snap digital pictures of each other, Facebook their friends, text, and Twitter. You need to slow down, enjoy the moment. You’re too impatient to get to the next thing.”

  “Yeah, can we go now, Dad?” Coke asked. “This is boring.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Dr. McDonald said. “Very few kids get to see this great country the way people used to: on the open road. It’s soul lifting. You’re going to see what makes America’s heart beat. My family took a cross-country trip when I was a kid. Boy, those were some of the best memories of my life.”

  “What happened?” Pep asked.

  “Uh . . . I . . . don’t remember, actually,” Dr. McDonald admitted. “It was a long time ago.”

  “It must have made a huge impression on you, Dad,” Coke remarked.

  “Well, it was a great trip,” his father insisted. “I remember that much.”

  “Can we go already?” Mrs. McDonald said impatiently. “The sooner we leave, the sooner we get to Kansas.”

  “And why exactly are we going to Kansas?” Pep asked.

  “To see the largest ball of twine in the world!” Mrs. McDonald exclaimed. “Remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” Coke muttered.

  Dr. McDonald rolled his eyes and turned the key. The RV rumbled to life. It didn’t sound like a regular car. The whole thing vibrated.

  “Front and back doors locked?” he asked Mrs. McDonald, the copilot.

  “Check,” Mrs. McDonald replied.

  “Lights out?”

  “Check.”

  “You called the post office to hold our mail?”

  “Check.”

  “You stopped the newspaper delivery?”

  “Check.”

  “Told the neighbors we would be away until the end of the summer?”

  “Check.”

  “Then we’re off!”

  Dr. McDonald shifted into reverse and carefully backed the RV out of the driveway, taking one last look at the house before heading down the street.

  In the backseats, the twins breathed involuntary sighs of relief. They were safe, at least for a few months. There would be no more lunatics in golf carts and bowler hats shooting poisoned darts at them. No more schools set on fire. No more buildings exploding. They could put all those attempts on their lives behind them. Maybe the whole thing had just been an elaborate hoax. Maybe they were being punked.

  “Are we there yet?” Coke asked when they pulled up to the first stop sign. His father turned around to shoot him a look, and Coke added, “Just kidding, Dad!”

  Okay, you need to do something before we continue with the story. Get out a road atlas of the United States. You know, one of those big Rand McNally books. Your mom or dad has one. Everybody has one. Go ahead and ask if you can borrow it. We’ll wait.

  Did you get it? Good.

  Open it up to a page that shows the entire country. If you wanted to drive all the way across the United States from the Pacific to the Atlantic, there are several different ways you could go. Route 2 goes north across the top of the country from Seattle all the way to Maine. See it?

  Route 20 starts at the Oregon coast and wends its way past Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, and Niagara Falls, and ends at Boston, Massachusetts.

  Another way to go would be to take Route 50, which is called the Loneliest Road. It starts in Oakland, California, and goes through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia, and finally ends in Ocean City, Maryland.

  There’s also the legendary Route 66, but that only goes as far as Chicago.

  Do you see them on the map?

  After discussing all these options, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald had chosen I-80, a superhighway that starts near San Francisco and ends in Teaneck, New Jersey. This historic route is almost 3,000 miles from one end to the other (2,899.54, to be exact). It follows part of the path of the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the First Transcontinental Railroad.

  As they merged onto Route 1 heading south toward San Francisco, Mrs. McDonald put on one of her classic rock CDs from her youth. Some long-haired band called Steppenwolf was singing “Born to Be Wild.” In the backseat, the kids groaned. You don’t play “Born to Be Wild” in an RV. It’s just not right. This was going to be a long drive.

  “Hey, you wanna play cards or something?” Coke asked his sister. He pulled out the deck of cards Bones had given them as a going-away present.

  “I don’t know any card games,” Pep replied.

  “I’ll teach you one,” Coke said. “Did you ever hear of a card game called 52 Pickup?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the easiest game in the world.”

  Coke took the entire deck of cards in one hand and squeezed it between his thumb and his first finger until the deck bent into an arch shape. Then he squeezed the deck a little more until the cards went shooting up in the air, one at a time. There was a wild spray of playing cards all over the back of the RV.

  “And that’s how you play 52 Pickup!” Coke said, cackling his insane laugh.

  “You are so obnoxious!” Pep told her brother.

  “Hey, knock it off back there!” Mrs. McDonald shouted. “Pick up those cards. This isn’t your bedroom. We all have to live in here.”

  Coke scooped up the cards and shuffled them mindlessly. Staring out the window as they crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, he suddenly remembered the envelope he’d found under his pillow the night before. He pulled it out of his backpack and handed it to hi
s sister without explanation.

  “Is this another one of your dumb games?” she asked, hesitating before accepting the envelope.

  “It was under my pillow when we went to sleep last night,” he whispered in her ear so their parents wouldn’t hear.

  Pep opened the envelope and looked at the message on the slip of paper inside:

  KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “Ya got me,” Coke replied.

  “It’s some kind of a cipher,” Pep whispered.

  “You mean a code?” Coke asked.

  “A code disguises words or phrases,” Pep explained. “A cipher disguises single letters.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “I didn’t,” Coke said.

  “Well, you’re a dope.”

  “What are you kids whispering about back there?” Mrs. McDonald asked.

  “Nothing,” the twins replied together.

  “How about we play the license plate game?” Dr. McDonald piped up. “Look! That car that just passed us on the left is from Florida!”

  “Not right now, Dad,” Pep said. She pulled out her cell phone so she and Coke could text each other without their parents listening in.

  PEP: Who gave u the envelope?

  COKE: Nobody. It was under pillow

  PEP: We can figure this out

  COKE: U can figure it out

  PEP: Some genius u r

  Pep carefully examined the slip of paper. Just before the explosion at the garage, Bones had told them that someone connected with The Genius Files would be contacting them. This message could be important.

  KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI

  Pep was good at word games. Whenever the family played Boggle or Scrabble, she would beat them all. She could finish most crossword puzzles in minutes.

  She searched for a pattern in the letters. Her concentration was so intense that she didn’t notice the music in the background, the family conversation, or the miles going by. The RV rolled through the hilly streets of San Francisco and past San Francisco International Airport.

  The letters of the message seemed entirely random. She was stumped.

  “We’re here!” Mrs. McDonald suddenly shouted as the RV rolled to a stop.

  “What?” Pep asked, looking up. “We’re in Kansas already?”

  “Where’s the world’s largest ball of twine?” asked Coke.

  “Not Kansas, silly!” Mrs. McDonald said. “We’re in Burlingame, California.”

  Burlingame? The kids knew Burlingame. It’s only twenty minutes south of San Francisco.

  “What are we doing here?” Pep asked. “I thought we were going cross-country.”

  Then she saw the little sign:

  “Pez?” Pep asked. “Who’s Pez?”

  “Not who,” Mrs. McDonald said. “What.”

  “You really don’t know what Pez is?” Coke asked his sister. “Are you from another planet? Pez is that candy you put in a little plastic holder, and when you move the head back, a piece of the candy pops out of the thing’s neck.”

  “That sounds disgusting,” Pep said as they climbed out of the RV. “They actually have a museum about that stuff?”

  In fact, they do. Mrs. McDonald had heard about the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia from one of her web readers, who email her tips all the time. She thought it would be the perfect place to feature on Amazing but True.

  Coke, of course, knew just about everything anybody would ever want to know about Pez. He had read a magazine article about it in the dentist’s office and remembered every word of it.

  Pez, he told the others, was invented in 1927 by an Austrian businessman named Eduard Haas. He got the name by abbreviating pfefferminz—the German word for peppermint.

  Mrs. McDonald grabbed her laptop computer and led the rest of the family into the museum. For a real “Pezhead,” this must be what heaven is like. The museum had 683 different Pez dispensers, including some vintage ones from the 1950s and the “extremely rare” Pez pineapple wearing sunglasses.

  Even Coke learned a thing or two he didn’t know. Pez, for instance, was originally sold as a mint to people who were trying to quit smoking.

  In one room was the world’s largest Pez dispenser. It was almost eight feet tall and looked sort of like a skinny snowman.

  “Isn’t this cool?” Mrs. McDonald asked, taking a photo to put on Amazing but True.

  “Oh yeah, Mom,” Pep said. “Totally.”

  Actually, it was pretty cool, but Pep wasn’t about to admit it. Things are cool when parents think they aren’t cool. If parents think something is cool, then, by definition, it can’t be. Any kid knows that.

  Dr. McDonald looked over the array of Pez memorabilia, shaking his head the whole time. He had spent the last twenty years of his life teaching and writing scholarly articles about American history. He could be visiting Valley Forge. He could be visiting Lexington and Concord. But here he was, staring at the largest Pez dispenser in the world. He sighed. These are the sacrifices grown-ups make for marriage, he figured.

  “I don’t get it,” Dr. McDonald mumbled. “What’s the dispenser for? Why can’t you just eat the candy without putting it in a dispenser?”

  “The dispenser is cool, Dad,” Coke informed him. “The candy tastes better when it comes out of Mr. Spock’s neck.”

  The Pez museum also had a section devoted to classic toys such as Tinkertoy, Colorforms, View-Master, and Lincoln Logs. The McDonald family spent a few minutes looking over the watches and T-shirts in the gift shop before piling out the door and back into the RV. Mrs. McDonald bought a Pez dispenser for each of the twins as a souvenir. A Coke Pez for Coke, and a Pepsi Pez for Pep.

  “Ben, you left the keys sitting in the RV with the window open!” Mrs. McDonald complained. “Anybody could have come along and driven this thing off.”

  “Sorry!” Dr. McDonald replied. And he was. He had a habit of forgetting to lock his car and take the keys.

  As they pulled out of the parking lot, Pep pulled out her pad and returned to the cipher.

  KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI

  The short break proved to be a good thing. It allowed Pep to take a fresh look at the cipher. Now she was seeing hidden words such as core, tan, heat, and tea. But she still couldn’t put them together into a coherent sentence. Coke leaned over his sister’s shoulder to check her progress.

  Maybe the spaces between the words are just decoys, Pep thought as she took a piece of paper and a pencil out of her backpack. The spaces make it look as though those are separate words, but they may have been inserted within the letters to make it harder to decipher the message.

  She rewrote the message, closing up the spaces.

  KCAOREHTANAOEASUOHEAHTNIAUOAYTEAEMLLIAWI

  It didn’t make it any clearer.

  “Maybe it’s in another language,” Coke whispered. “It looks like it might be Hawaiian or something.”

  “Or it could be a transposition cipher,” Pep mumbled to herself.

  She wrote out the cipher again, but this time in reverse order.

  I WAILL MEAET YAOU AIN THAE HOUSAE OAN ATHE ROACK

  “There must be a mistake in there somewhere,” Coke whispered.

  “No!” Pep said. “Wait a minute! It must have nulls in it.”

  “Nulls?” Coke asked. “What’s a null?”

  “A fake letter,” she told him. “A letter that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “I just do,” she replied. “I’ll take out all the As and see what happens.”

  Pep rewrote the message:

  I WILL MEET YOU IN THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK

  Chapter 12

  Ups and Downs

  I WILL MEET YOU IN THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK

  What the heck was that supposed to mean?

  Pep lo
oked at the words she had written.

  “I never heard of a house on a rock,” she whispered to her brother.

  “There are probably thousands of houses that are built on rocks,” Coke replied. “Maybe it’s another secret message that means something completely different.”

  “These Genius Files people are so annoying,” Pep complained. “Why don’t they just tell us what’s going on? Why do they have to make us figure it out?”

  “The message didn’t necessarily come from them, y’know,” Coke said. “It could have come from anybody.”

  Want to follow the McDonalds on their cross-country trip? Get on the internet and go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com), Mapquest (www.mapquest.com), Rand McNally (www.randmcnally.com), or whatever navigation website you like best.

  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

  Okay, now type in Burlingame, California (where the Museum of Pez Memorabilia is located), and click SEARCH MAPS. Click the little + or – sign on the screen to zoom in or out until you get a sense of where the twins are. Now you can follow them on their journey.

  “Then who are we supposed to meet in the house on the rock?” Pep asked, knowing she wasn’t going to get an answer. “And when? This message doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “We’ll just have to keep our eyes open,” Coke said, ending the discussion.

  Dr. McDonald hopped on Route 101 North through the city and picked up Interstate 80 East as the RV crossed over the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. They were on their way now. If they wanted to, they could just stay on I-80 all the way across the country.

  “Just fifteen hundred and forty-seven miles until we get to the largest ball of twine in the world!” Mrs. McDonald said excitedly after punching the data into her laptop. “And twenty-seven hundred and sixty-two miles to Washington.”

  Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).

  Click Get Directions.

  In the A box, type Burlingame CA.

  In the B box, type Chico CA.

  Click Get Directions.

  Pep did a quick mental calculation. If they averaged sixty-five miles per hour, it would take them more than forty-two hours to drive to Washington. That would be without stopping, of course. Once you add in sleeping, eating, stopping for gas, and just getting out to stretch their legs, it would be closer to . . . Oh, she didn’t want to think about it.