by Paul Tobin
“I know about washing machines,” Nate said, jogging along with me. “They’re primitive. Ion bombardments are far more effective at cleansing materials, but the particular problem that I was talking about is—”
“Dog smells mustard?” Bosper said. The terrier was on the front steps. How he’d made it there before us, I have no idea, but I’ve learned not to ask Bosper how he does things, because he’s worse than Nate at explanations. He gets too excited talking about math, the shifting planes of reality, and quantum alignment, and—
“Rarr rarr rarrr!” Bosper said. Or, actually . . . he barked it.
“Hmmm,” Nate said.
“Unfortunate,” Betsy said.
“What?” I asked. But it was at that moment that Bosper, snarling mad, came running for me.
“Bosper?” I said. It almost looked like he was going to attack me.
“Attack!” Bosper yelled, so that settled that. The terrier was racing after me, snapping at my leg. At my mustard leg in particular.
“Why is he attacking me?” I shrieked. “This is entirely piffle!”
“He’s allergic to mustard!” Nate said. “It makes him crazy! And it interferes with his acceleration!”
“It does not interfere with his acceleration!” I said. “He’s too fast!” I was trying to get away from the terrier, but Bosper was far too quick, thanks to that unfair advantage that four-legged creatures have over us lesser-legged beings. Four legs are faster than two.
“I meant it interferes with the way I accelerated his brain!” Nate said. “With the method I used to make him smarter. And . . . oh! You shouldn’t let him bite you!”
“Why not?” I shouted, trying to keep Betsy between Bosper and me.
“Because it would hurt,” Nate said.
“Oh, duh. I thought you meant something extra. Like, you’d given him anti-matter teeth or something.” I was crawling on top of Betsy, where Bosper couldn’t reach me.
“He can totally reach you up there,” Betsy said, as if she could read my thoughts, although I might point out that she didn’t read my mind in time to stop me from crawling onto her hood, where Bosper easily jumped up and started biting at me. Luckily, he just sank his teeth into my pants leg.
“Nate,” I said. “If it isn’t too much trouble, could you do some genius thing? Your dog is attacking me, and while I don’t mean to cast any blame, this is entirely your fault.”
Nate began fiddling with an odd device that he took out of his messenger bag. It looked like a transparent can of tennis balls, except the balls were bright red and spinning around. Plus, there was a small keyboard on the side. Quickly tapping on the keys, Nate said, “No problem! I can solve this! I’ll project a hologram of a cat, and that should distract Bosper long enough that we can get into the school, where he can’t follow.”
Tap tap tap. This was the noise of Nate’s fingers on the keys.
“Quack?” This was the sound of a perplexed duck that had suddenly appeared in the parking lot.
“That’s a duck!” This was the noise of me, an outraged seventh grade girl named Delphine Cooper as she was being attacked by a dog.
“Ooo.” This was the sound of Nate, a boy I oftentimes consider to be a genius, and oftentimes do not.
Nate said, “My holo-projector must have been damaged in the accident. It’s showing the wrong images. Here, I’ll try again.”
Tap tap tappity-tap. That was the sound of Nate’s fingers on the keyboard, again.
“That is not a cat!” This was me, again, deciding that Nate was definitely not a genius, because while the duck had disappeared, there was now a huge crowd of bears all over the parking lot.
“Piffle!” I said, leaping off from the car, with Bosper hanging from my pants leg and growling at me.
“Give me that!” I told Nate, grabbing the device from his hands. I spelled out “cat,” on the keyboard, then looked up. There was a giant watermelon. Useless. So I spelled out “feline” on the keyboard, then looked up. There was a giant picture of Susan Heller, the girl Nate has a crush on. She was blinking her eyes in an alluring manner.
“Really, Nate?” I said, glaring at him. He had the decency to blush, and I would’ve gone over to him and delivered a well-earned punch on his shoulder, but his dog was chewing on my pants, and if I didn’t deal with it soon, then Bosper was going to start chewing on my leg.
So I spelled out “peanut butter” on the keyboard.
“Hmmm,” I said when I looked up. There were three jars of peanut butter on the parking lot. Two of them were of the chunky variety, and the third was creamy. The hologram was so complete that I could even smell the rich aroma. Nate’s inventions truly are amazing. It was almost as if there really were three actual jars of peanut butter on the parking lot.
Although they did have spider’s legs.
“Ick,” I said. What else do you say about spider legs?
“Hmm,” Nate said, which is not what you say about three jars of peanut butter scurrying away on spider legs.
“Oh, ick,” Betsy said. Properly.
“Is butter of peanuts?” Bosper growled out. His voice wasn’t anything near normal. He sounded like his throat was full of potato chips. He let go of my pants leg and stared at the peanut butter jars racing away on their icky disgusting spider legs.
Then hurried off in pursuit.
“Hooray!” Nate said. “It worked!”
“Ugg,” I said. “I will never again eat peanut butter without thinking of spider legs.”
“A certain number of arachnids fall into the peanut butter vats during peanut butter production, anyway,” Nate said. “So, whenever you eat peanut butter, there’s a small chance you’re actually eating spider legs.”
I stared at him.
I so stared at him.
Betsy rolled back away from us, giving me punching room.
“Piffle,” I said. Low in my throat. Like a growl.
Our school’s front door was locked.
That was no problem for someone like me, who has an adventure kit and who trains in her backyard obstacle course, meaning it was simply a matter of shimmying up the side of the nearest tree, balancing myself while walking along a branch, jumping onto a second-story ledge of Polt Middle School, and then opening a window to slide inside.
Where I found Nate waiting for me.
“How’d you get in here so fast?” I asked.
“My shirt can unlock doors,” he said, tapping on his shirt.
“Okay,” I said, totally accepting Nate’s answer, because it seemed highly probable that an explanation would either take too long or make me crazy, and either way we didn’t have time. There was a race to be won.
We ran out into the hall. We needed to make it to Mrs. Isaacson’s classroom, where Nate had taped the packet of “Speed Runner” pills beneath her desk. And we needed to do it before . . .
“Uh-oh,” I said.
There were two teacups on the hallway floor.
It could only mean one thing.
“They’re here,” I said, pointing to the teacups. My voice echoed in the empty halls. It sounded ominous.
“And recently, too,” Nate said. “They put down those teacups two minutes and thirteen seconds ago.”
“How can you know that?”
“The temperature of a human body is 98.6 degrees, so it’s just simple math to measure the residual warmth on the teacups and calculate how long they’ve been cooling since human contact.”
“Nice,” I said. “You’re like one of those cowboys who can track horses across the wilderness. Can you tell which way they went? How many there are?”
“Yes,” Nate said. “There were four of them. And they went down the hall that way.”
“Cool!” I said, looking to Nate in amazement. “How did you know that? More temperature measures? Air displacement? Something to do with scent residue or vibration patterns on the floor?” I like to think that I’m beginning to understand Nate’s mind.
“No,” he said. “I just looked down the hall.” He pointed back over my shoulder.
I turned around.
There were four of them. Red Death Tea Society members. Two women walking together, and, a bit farther back, another woman and a man pushing a tea trolley.
The man with the tea trolley said, “Hey. Is that Nate and Delphine?”
I said, “No.” But, since I did not think my amazing subterfuge would last very long, I decided to run.
Clop clop clop! That was the noise of my shoes against the hallway floor. It was a noise that was not, unfortunately, accompanied by the noise of Nate’s shoes running along with me. Instead, it was tap tap tappity-tap as Nate quickly typed something on his malfunctioning holographic projector and then . . .
There were bears all over the hallway. I’d guess there were about twenty bears on the floor, and during any normal day that would mean there were twenty bears total, because bears are floor-oriented animals. Mostly, bears stay on forest floors, but very occasionally and very unfortunately they’re on a hallway floor. This time, however, there were also bears bounding along on the walls and even crawling across the ceiling as if they were spiders. If you’ve ever looked above your head and seen a spider on the ceiling, you’ve probably thought to yourself, “Gahh and ick and piffle! I do not like having a spider above my head!”
I can assure you that it’s preferable to having a bear on the ceiling.
The assassins began yelling in fright, but at the same time mobilizing into action, activating their force fields and energizing their disintegrator pistols and being careful not to upset their tea trolley, because their tea was almost prepared and they were thirsty.
“C’mon,” Nate whispered to me, leaning in close to be heard over the roar of what I hoped were illusionary bears. I mean, I knew that they were being projected by Nate’s hologram device, but . . .
. . . well, they smelled like bears. All musty and muddy and sweaty and stinky, like raw meat in mud.
And they sounded like bears, all roaring and heaving and panting, filling the air with their bellows of rage.
And they felt like bears, because I could feel them brushing against me as they charged around, hurrying here and there, and I could even feel the drops of slobber from the ones on the ceiling, which is exactly as gross as it sounds, and maybe even a little more.
So they smelled like bears and they looked like bears, and they sounded and felt like bears, so maybe they were bears? The only remaining one of the five senses was taste, and I did not want to taste the bears, and I especially did not want them to taste me.
“C’mon, to . . . where?” I asked Nate. “And . . . are these bears real?”
“We need to get to Mrs. Isaacson’s room. And the bears are only forty percent real.”
“You just one hundred percent terrified me,” I noted. But by then he was taking my arm, picking me up, and tossing me over his shoulder.
Which was unexpected.
First, this is not the way that Nathan Bannister acts. Second, while I only weigh about ninety-three pounds, that’s about ninety-three more pounds than it looks like Nate could lift. And yet he tossed me over his shoulder like I was nothing and began running down the hall at top speed, occasionally leaping over bears.
“If you’re wondering how I can carry you,” he said, “it’s because I’m wearing power gloves.” He was indeed wearing gloves. They were paper thin and skin-colored, so I hadn’t noticed them at first, but now they were softly glowing.
“What—” I started to say, but then he ran up onto the side of the wall, so that we were running along the wall as if it were no big deal. My sense of sanity thought it was a big deal, and it closed its eyes.
“Power shoes,” Nate said.
“There they are!” one of the assassins yelled as we began to race past them. She was in her early thirties, with long blond hair. She drank from a teacup, one finger pointing out to us. The other three assassins all pointed their guns in our direction, which I found to be disconcerting.
“Go away!” Nate yelled.
It was like an explosion. The cult members, the tea trolley, even some of the bears . . . they were all flung into the air by the force of Nate’s shout, with fur flying and tea spilling and limbs flailing and teacups shattering. One of the women hit her head on the wall and was knocked unconscious. The man was all tangled up in the tea trolley. Another of the women was flung through the door to Mrs. Isaacson’s classroom, smashing it down. The last woman managed to stay on her feet for a moment, but then fell as unconscious as the others.
“Power tongue!” Nate told me, showing me his tongue, which had what seemed to be a rubber band around it, glowing a neon green. It was rather gross, but . . . as Nate once told me . . . science is often gross.
“Power tongue?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Oh. I can speak different languages with it.”
“Okay.”
“And shout really loud.”
“So I noticed.”
“And spit over a hundred feet.”
“Nice! You totally have to make me one of those.” My brother Steve was suddenly in serious trouble. He’d recently made up songs about how poorly I dress and how sloppily I eat, but now he would soon fall to my wrath . . . from a hundred feet away. I was well into daydreaming about spitwad cannon fire when Chester Humes peeked out from the classroom and said, “Hello?”
Chester is a year younger than Nate and me. He’s in sixth grade, and always wears blue shirts and yellow pants, usually with red socks, meaning he’s rather colorful. He enjoys singing and often does so in the halls, where it is not generally acceptable to sing and where many people make fun of him, despite how he has a nice voice. He doesn’t mind when people make fun of him, though, because he says that he enjoys singing more than he’s bothered by jerks, so why let them stop him?
I respect him for that.
“Hello?” he said again, looking outside in the hall. “What’s going on?”
“We’re playing soccer,” I said. Again, my skills of deception are not always at the top of their game.
“Are those bears?” Chester said. His voice was squeaking.
“No,” I said.
“They look like bears.”
“Why are you so fixated on the bears?” I asked, pushing Chester into the room, yanking Nate inside. “And why are you here? I thought the building was closed.”
“It is, but I’m on cleaning duty. This room is a mess! Bubblegum under the seats. Dust everywhere. Scuff marks on the floor. And somebody taped this under Mrs. Isaacson’s desk.” He held up a silver packet. It was clearly labeled “Speed Runner” in Nate’s handwriting.
“That’s mine,” I said. “I left it here by mistake.”
“Really?” Chester said. He looked to Nate for confirmation.
“No,” Nate said. “Delphine is lying.” I’d forgotten about Nate having to tell the truth all the time. A bit inconvenient now.
Nate said, “It’s a packet of ‘Speed Runner’ pills. They enrich your metabolism a thousandfold, super-charging your atomic structure, effectively making you as fast as lightning. I hid it under the desk because I schedule myself to do dumb things, just to keep life adventurous.”
Chester was simply staring at Nate.
Nate said, “We came here because the Red Death Tea Society is trying to steal as many of my inventions as possible. We can’t let that packet fall into their hands. The fate of the entire world is at risk. Your clothes do not match.”
“What?”
“Sorry. That last bit slipped out.”
It was at that moment that the windows exploded. In fact, it was not only at that moment that the windows exploded, but also several following moments. It was the slowest explosion I’ve ever seen, with the windows bursting and glass flying everywhere, with the desks being pushed away from the walls with the concussion of the blast and the ceiling tiles rippling and shattering as the explosion reached them, but instead
of it happening fast, it was slow as molasses.
“What’s happening?” I asked Nate, taking a few steps back.
“Slowstorm,” he said.
“Snowstorm?” I asked. There wasn’t any snow. And it wasn’t cold.
“No. Slowstorm. One of Maculte’s inventions. It slows time by a factor of almost a thousand. But there’s a tremendous energy outlay involved. Look at your hair.”
“It got messed up during the car crash! You can’t blame me for what it looks like! And it’s none of your business!” I was getting ready to punch Nate in the arm again. Secretly, I’m almost always ready to punch him in the arm, but I was double-ready, right then.
“No. I mean, look at the way it’s starting to stand up.”
“Oh.” He was right. My red hair was starting to rise up into the air, sticking straight out, like I was some Medusa-type creature. I was studying some strands of my hair when a piece of window glass went strolling past my eyes. Hundreds of other pieces were nearing me, and thousands of other pieces were following behind them. Slow or not, we were right in the middle of an explosion. It was time to leave.
“Let’s go!” I told Nate and Chester, grabbing Chester’s arm so that I could pull him along. We would have to find some way to get past the Red Death Tea Society assassins in the hallway, and then sneak past whoever had triggered the slow-motion explosion, and then we’d have to—
“Oof!” I said. Chester hadn’t moved at all.
I mean . . . at all.
It was like yanking on a statue. He wouldn’t budge. He was frozen into position, caught in the Slowstorm, but standing right in the path of the oncoming explosion.
“This is bad,” Nate said. “We won’t be able to move Chester. He’s . . . stuck. A Slowstorm uses gravitational warps to alter the cadence of time. Time grows . . . heavy, I guess. More ponderous. Slower.”
“Is that even possible?” My opinions on what I’d once considered impossible had changed a lot since I’d become friends with Nate. I now knew that science could conquer almost anything. Nate had made giant cats, talking dogs, sword-fighting mice, friend rays, robots, and an app for my phone that could detect the nearest clown so that I can always avoid them, because clowns freak me out.