Mission Unstoppable

by Dan Gutman

  They didn’t take the time to look at any of that stuff. They were running for their lives.

  As he ran, Coke turned around to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Higgins rudely pushing her way through the crowd of Japanese tourists. She had pulled something out of her purse and was holding it in front of her, but he couldn’t tell what it was.

  “I think she has a knife!” Pep said.

  “Follow me!” he told his sister, pulling her into the next room, marked Streets of Yesterday.

  With Mrs. Higgins gaining on them, the twins hurried through a replica of a small-town American street from the 1880s. There was a toy store, a barber’s shop, sheriff’s office, and fire station, the windows of all the buildings filled with antique treasures of the period. The trees were made of cement. The “street” was made of bricks and was illuminated by dim gas lamps. It was like a trip back in time to the days before strip malls and fast food.

  At the end of the “street” they rushed past The Gladiator Calliope, a mechanical music machine that looked like a marching band on a steamboat. Foot-high statues were playing cymbals and snare drums. Dixieland music filled the air.

  “You brats won’t get away this time!” Mrs. Higgins shouted at them.

  The twins were out of breath already but didn’t dare slow down. There was a clump of people in front of them taking pictures of the displays with disposable cameras.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me!” Coke said as he elbowed past them. “Coming through! Sorry! Bathroom emergency!”

  “We can’t just keep running!” Pep said breathlessly. “We’ve got to do something to stop her!”

  “I know,” Coke replied as they left Streets of Yesterday and entered another room called The Heritage of the Sea. “Grab one of those balls of twine out of my backpack, will you?”

  “You’re gonna throw a ball of twine at her?” Pep said, trying to keep moving and unzip Coke’s backpack at the same time.

  “No, you dope,” Coke told her. “You’ll see.”

  The cavernous room was dominated by a statue of a gigantic, whalelike sea creature that was as long as the Statue of Liberty is high. It had two rows of sharp, triangular teeth, and a full-size rowboat in its mouth. The sea creature appeared to be fighting with an octopus. Down below, a mechanical music machine was playing a fractured version of the old Beatles song “Octopus’s Garden.”

  It was like being chased through somebody’s hallucination.

  Pep handed her brother a ball of twine and zipped up his backpack again. Without slowing down, Coke ripped the paper ring off the ball and unrolled three or four feet of twine.

  A few people were clumped around the teeth of the sea creature, gawking and taking pictures. Coke maneuvered past them and went down the ramp to the other end of the room where there were no tourists. He found a spot where he could hide behind a beam on one side of the narrow walkway and Pep could hide on the other side.

  “Take this end,” he instructed his sister, holding out the end of the twine. “Wrap it around your hand tightly.”

  He stretched the twine across the walkway and ducked behind the beam on the other side. The click of rushing shoes on the catwalk was getting closer. It had better be Mrs. Higgins, Coke thought. He didn’t want to hurt a stranger.

  “Hold it taut,” he whispered to his sister.

  Mrs. Higgins was running down the ramp, trying desperately to catch up with the pesky McDonald twins.

  This room, like all the rooms in The House on the Rock, was dimly lit. It was impossible to see the line of twine the twins were holding across the walkway at about neck level.

  “Aggggggggggggggggg!” Mrs. Higgins gurgled when she hit the line at full speed.

  She crumpled to the ground as if she had run into a wall.

  “That oughta hold her for a while,” Coke said, tossing aside the ball of twine.

  “Let’s get out of here,” his sister said.

  The exit for Heritage of the Sea led directly into another enormous room called Tribute to Nostalgia. It was filled with old cars, stagecoaches, horse-drawn hearses, hot-air balloons, and some other mysterious vehicles.

  As they walked briskly, Pep pulled out her cell phone to check the time. It was 12:46.

  “Look,” she said, “let’s just forget about The Infinity Room. Mrs. Higgins only lured us here to try and kill us. We stopped her. I say we go find Mom and Dad and get out of here. Try to forget this whole thing.”

  “I’m with you,” Coke said. “Gimme my deck of cards, will you? I need something to calm myself down.”

  Finding your way out of The House on the Rock is no easy task. First the twins had to wend their way around Music of Yesterday, a series of rooms filled with increasingly elaborate mechanical music machines. With Mrs. Higgins incapacitated (and almost decapitated), the twins paused for just a moment to take a look at the eerie orchestras of harps, cellos, violins, and pianos playing Latin tangos and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” with animated statues that stood in for human musicians. They were beautifully restored machines, marvels of art and technology. The twins let down their guard a bit to enjoy the sights and sounds.

  In the corner of what was called The Red Room were two full-size mannequins standing stiffly inside suits of Gothic armor. One of them had a mustache.

  “Check this out,” Pep told her brother. “They’re so lifelike.”

  Coke came over for a look.

  “These guys look familiar,” he said, “almost like I might have met them before.”

  When Coke reached up to touch a bruise on its face, the mannequin suddenly put up its arms and grabbed him roughly by the neck. The other one grabbed Pep, and she screamed.

  “Don’t waste your breath, sweetheart,” he said. “They’ll just think it’s part of the display.”

  “It’s them!” Coke said, struggling to get free. “The bowler dudes! Both of them!”

  “Very good! That wasn’t very nice what you did to me at the SPAM Museum,” the mustachioed bowler dude told Pep.

  “Don’t you know you should respect your elders?” said the other one.

  “Not when they’re trying to kill me,” Pep muttered. She could not break free from the man’s iron grip.

  “We’ve toyed with you troublemakers long enough,” the mustachioed bowler dude said. “Now you’re coming with us. Let’s go. March!”

  Each bowler dude marched a McDonald twin down a hallway and through an exhibit titled Spirit of Aviation. Biplanes, stunt planes, and dozens of vintage model planes dangled overhead. Coke looked for an escape route.

  “Where are you taking us?” Pep asked. Her neck was sore from the bowler dude’s grip.

  “You’ll see.”

  They dragged the twins through the hallway into a room filled by a gigantic, spinning carousel. It was like looking at a kaleidoscope: more than 20,000 lights, 182 chandeliers, and 18 rows of hand-carved centaurs, mermaids, dragons, unicorns, water buffaloes, dolphins, and peacocks. But no horses. Had there been time to look, they would have seen more than 200 horse figures hanging from the walls.

  The bowler dudes pulled the twins through a red tunnel into yet another room, this one with giant pipe organ consoles, a tree filled with steel drums, and a diesel engine with a propeller the size of a grown man.

  “Leave us alone!” Pep shouted. She was trying to stamp on the foot of the bowler dude who was holding her. “What do you have against us? We didn’t do anything!”

  “Shut up!” bowler dude replied, tightening his grip on her. “We’ll be there soon.”

  I’m going to die, Pep thought. I’m going to die on my birthday. This can’t be happening.

  The two men marched the twins over a series of rooms, bridges, and catwalks into a room with two spinning carousels that were filled with antique dolls. Five hundred of them, with large eyes staring intently straight ahead, like corpses. Why are dolls so creepy? Pep closed her eyes to avoid looking at them. Coke tried all his karate moves, but the bowler dude’s suit of armor
made it impossible to deliver a blow that would do any damage.

  And finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the twins were dragged down a hallway and into a more open area. The contrast of bright sunlight hurt their eyes. All they could make out was a large sign:

  “Good-bye.”

  “And good luck,” the bowler dudes said as they threw Coke and Pep to the ground.

  The twins turned around, and the bowler dudes were gone. The large door through which they’d left closed with a clunk. Coke remembered the sound of the detention room door locking at school. That was just before the school burned to the ground.

  Coke and Pep turned around and stood up. Their eyes were adjusting to the light.

  It was a long, thin, empty room that stretched to . . . infinity. The walls were made of hundreds of small windows, looking out onto trees below. There was a large transparent box on the floor about three quarters of the way down.

  “It would be cool to play Frisbee in here,” Coke noted.

  The door behind them clicked open, and the twins wheeled around to see two people stumbling into the room, their hands behind their backs. Their faces were familiar.

  “Bones!” shouted Coke.

  “Mya!” shouted Pep.

  Bones and Mya didn’t speak, and they didn’t step forward to embrace them.

  “Are you here to rescue us?” Coke asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Bones replied. “Not this time.”

  “Why?” Pep asked. “We thought . . .”

  It was only then that she noticed that Bones and Mya had thick ropes tied around their ankles. Their hands were tied behind their backs. Bones nodded his head to indicate to the twins that they should turn around.

  When they did, they saw that a man was standing in front of the glass box at the other end of The Infinity Room. Dressed in a loose-fitting brown suit and an old-time hat, he was thin, stooped, and squinty eyed. He walked toward them slowly. A cigarette dangled from his fingers.

  “Well, if it isn’t the famous McDonald twins,” he said. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in the flesh, so to speak. And right on time, too. One o’clock exactly. I so appreciate punctuality.”

  “Who are you?” Coke asked.

  “My name,” the man said, “is Dr. Herman Warsaw.”

  Chapter 24

  The Infinity Room

  The twins stood frozen for a moment. Finally, after all they had heard about this man, they were face-to-face with the genius behind The Genius Files.

  “Are you really Dr. Warsaw?” Pep asked hesitantly.

  “Would you like to see my driver’s license, Pepsi?” he said, a smile curving the ends of his lips up.

  “It’s him,” Bones said. “Believe me, it’s him.”

  “I almost thought you were, like, a fictional character or something,” Coke said.

  “Aren’t we all, Coke?” Dr. Warsaw replied. “Ultimately, who’s to say what’s real or imaginary?”

  “Thank God you’re here, Dr. Warsaw!” Pep said excitedly. “These crazy people have been trying to kill us!”

  Bones and Mya groaned. Dr. Warsaw let out a small chuckle.

  “Yes. I’m so glad you two accepted my, uh, invitations to come here today,” he said.

  “So you’re the one who’s been sending us all those ciphers?” Pep asked.

  “Guilty as charged,” Dr. Warsaw admitted. “I needed to test your mental ability. To see if you were worthy. To see if you were as smart as I thought you were. Congratulations. You passed. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here, obviously.”

  “He’s insane!” Bones called out from behind. “He’s going to kill you. He’s going to kill us all!”

  “We believed in you!” Mya yelled. “We believed in The Genius Files!”

  “I know you did,” Dr. Warsaw said sadly. “So did I.”

  “Why did you bring us here?” Coke demanded.

  “Be patient, Coke,” Dr. Warsaw said. “What’s the rush? You’ve waited this long. What do you think of The House on the Rock? Pretty amazing place, eh? The unusual is commonplace here.”

  “We kind of . . . rushed through,” Coke said.

  Dr. Warsaw ignored the remark. He spread his arms wide.

  “Alex Jordan is my hero, my role model,” he told them. “This citadel of sandstone had endured millions of years of rain, wind, and glaciers when Jordan found it sixty years ago. He knew he couldn’t improve upon nature, so he put a cherry on top. He took this slab of rock and turned it into a retreat where he could build his dream. And he did it almost single-handedly, carrying the stone and mortar up to the top in wicker baskets strapped to his back.”

  “What does that have to do with us?” Pep shouted. But Dr. Warsaw ignored her.

  “Alex Jordan was a buildaholic. A genius. A crazy genius, maybe. But a genius nevertheless. He was a lot like us, really, don’t you think, Coke?”

  Dr. Warsaw took a drag on his cigarette.

  “Yeah, he must have been a real genius,” Coke replied. He moved his eyes up, down, left, and right without moving his head. There had to be a way out. This guy was crazier than Alex Jordan. Alex Jordan never tried to kill anyone. There was no telling what Dr. Warsaw had in mind for them.

  “Let them go!” Bones shouted. “They’re just kids! It’s not their fault that your grand plan to save the world failed!”

  “It did fail, didn’t it?” mumbled Dr. Warsaw. “It failed miserably. Now I have to start all over again. Sometimes you can’t fix things. You have to replace them.”

  Coke tried desperately to think of a plan. With the help of Bones and Mya, the twins could overpower Dr. Warsaw, no problem. But tied up with rope, Bones and Mya were helpless. Without them, it was still two against one. Coke calculated the odds that Dr. Warsaw had some kind of a weapon in his pocket. The madman kept sticking his hand in there.

  “The Infinity Room is the fourteenth—and final—room of The House on the Rock,” Dr. Warsaw informed them. “Right now we’re hanging in midair over the valley, like the beak of a giant bird. Just steel and glass. There are no hidden pillars, no suspension cables holding us up. The Infinity Room relies entirely on its own internal structure for support. Quite remarkable, don’t you think?”

  “Quite,” Coke replied, nervously fingering the deck of cards in his pocket.

  I can take this guy all by myself if I have to, Coke thought. He’s frail. He would probably go down with one punch.

  While Dr. Warsaw’s attention was on her brother, Pep slowly slipped her backpack off one shoulder. Maybe she could throw it at him, she figured, and distract him for a few seconds while Coke did the Ace Fist stuff.

  “Look over here,” Dr. Warsaw said, beckoning the twins to follow him deeper into The Infinity Room. “Beautiful view, isn’t it? On a clear day, you can see thirty miles or more.”

  “Don’t do it!” Mya warned. “Don’t do anything he tells you!”

  The twins took a few tentative steps forward but stopped short of the glass box. Dr. Warsaw leaned over and removed the top of the box, placing the sheet of glass against the wall behind it. That left a large hole in the bottom of The Infinity Room. Large enough for somebody to fall through.

  “That’s one hundred and fifty feet straight down,” Dr. Warsaw continued. “A long way to the ground. A person could get killed. Can you imagine what it would be like to fall one hundred and fifty feet, Pepsi?”

  “Yes, I can,” she replied. It seemed like a long time ago when in fact it had only been a week.

  Dr. Warsaw chuckled.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “You must have been pretty upset with your brother when he pushed you off that cliff.”

  Pep finally saw the big picture. It was Dr. Warsaw who had them chased to the edge of the cliff outside their school. It was Warsaw who arranged for them to be thrown into a pit at Sand Mountain. He was responsible for the attack at the ball of twine, and the SPAM Museum too. He was responsible for everything. He hired Mrs. Higgins and those bowler
dudes to do his dirty work for him.

  Pep had been working hard to hold it together, but she finally lost her composure.

  “Look,” she suddenly barked, “my brother and I are tired of these games. Why don’t you just let us out of here so we can get on with our lives? We won’t press charges against you for all you’ve done to us.”

  “Be cool, Pep,” Coke cautioned his sister.

  Dr. Warsaw slowly stubbed out his cigarette with his foot, and immediately took another one out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a match.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Pepsi,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, that would be counterproductive to my goals.”

  “Which are?” asked Coke.

  “To kill you, of course,” Dr. Warsaw explained.

  Pep gulped.

  “You said goals,” Coke said. “What’s your other goal?”

  “Oh,” Dr. Warsaw replied. “I’m sorry, Coke. My first goal is to kill you. And my second goal is to kill her. I meant the plural form of the word you. Please excuse my lapse in grammar. It was never my best subject.”

  “Why do you want to kill us?” Pep asked, fighting back tears. “You were the one who thought of The Genius Files! It was a good thing! You were the one who came up with the idea of using kids like us to solve the problems of the world!”

  “I did,” Dr. Warsaw replied, shaking his head sadly. “And I recruited some fine people to help me carry out the plan.”

  He gestured toward Mya and Bones.

  “So why—,” Pep began.

  “Because he’s crazy!” Mya yelled. “After what he experienced on 9/11, he went crazy!”

  “Hush, Mya,” Dr. Warsaw said. “In theory The Genius Files made perfect sense. But I didn’t really know much about children at the time. Never had kids of my own. I always wanted to get married and start a family. Never found the right woman, I guess.”

  “Gee, I wonder why,” Coke said sarcastically.