by Paul Tobin
“Won’t have to,” Nate said. “The count is seven and ten.”
“Nate, that makes less sense than when you were talking about submarine shoes. What are you talking about?”
“One,” he said. “Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.”
The whole time he was counting, I was watching Luria struggle with her grip on the doorway. The ferocious current was an endlessly bulldozing wave of water storming throughout the entire school. And then, just as Nate counted to seven, Luria lost her grip and was instantly washed away, disappearing into the depths of the study hall like a leaf blowing in the wind.
“Eight. Nine. Ten,” Nate said. And then, with a grunt of rage heard even over the surging drumbeats of the water smashing into the lockers and the ceiling tiles, Maculte lost his grip on the doorway and was whisked away into the darkened watery depths of the study hall.
He was gone.
“We need to get outside before my shoes lose power,” Nate said, as if that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. He was still holding me around the waist, using the power of his submarine shoes to keep the water from washing us away.
“Okay!” I said. I was literally in his hands.
“Trombone,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
A trombone, caught in the current, bounced off my head. It made a non-musical noise. I did, too.
“Trombone,” I said. “Got it.”
Nate began swimming toward the front door, with the two of us zooming through the halls of Polt Middle School like sopping wet birds. We whooshed past the gym, which was cluttered with soccer balls and basketballs and shin guards caught in the currents, along with a volleyball net we narrowly avoided. Then we shot through the cafeteria, soaring majestically through a flock of floating bread loaves.
Finally, we were outside, spat out through the front steps in an ongoing gusher and sliding halfway across a parking lot that was inches deep in water.
“How much water did you make?” I asked Nate, looking at the school, where every single window and door was doing a spit-take.
“My calculations were that there would be enough water to wake me up. Just . . . a bit of water splashed in my face. But I failed to take the Delphine Factor into account.” Nate was standing ankle deep in water, slowly breathing in, slowly breathing out. It looked like he was trying to avoid passing out.
“The Delphine Factor?” I asked, looking around for Chester, trying to make sure he was okay.
“The Expand-O-Water increases by a factor of one thousand when it impacts a hard surface,” Nate said. I looked around, thinking of how there’d been a single droplet of Expand-O-Water in the tinfoil packet. By my rough estimate, there were infinite drops of water around us now, which is considerably more than one thousand droplets.
“But,” Nate continued, “you must have smacked the droplet into the floor really hard.”
“I did. I smacked it pretty good.”
“Yes. That’s something you do. That’s the Delphine Factor. You smack things.”
“That is indeed something I do,” I said, agreeing with him, bursting with pride. My brother Steve says that girls shouldn’t smack things. I have smacked him for this. Girls should do whatever we want to do.
Nate said, “It would’ve caused a much greater chain reaction than I’d originally intended. So instead of increasing the water by a thousandfold, it did it by a thousand-thousand-thousand-thousand-thousandfold.”
“I have folded a lot of thousands,” I said, looking at the school. The water was just beginning to slow down, with the windows and doorways now only spewing water, instead of gushing it out. For one moment, I thought we might be returning to normalcy, but . . . no.
Of course not.
The water froze.
Not that it turned to ice or anything like that. It just . . . quit moving, the way a bunny will do when you spot it in your yard, nibbling at the grass, and the bunny realizes you’re watching and it goes motionless. The water coming from Polt Middle School was just like that, frozen into position, except that it wasn’t furry or adorable with big floppy ears.
“Uh-oh,” Nate said. I do not like when he says it. When my regular friends say “uh-oh,” it usually means something like when Liz Morris gets the hiccups, or when Wendy Kamoss forgets her homework, or when Ventura León and Stine Keykendall accidentally wear identical clothes on the same day, such as their Scuba Bunny shirts. At the worst, an “uh-oh” means something like when my brother Steve is pretending he’s at a friend’s house when he’s really at a concert, and Dad finds out.
But with Nate, an “uh-oh” has a far wider range of possibilities, many of them in the categories of “dire” or “dreadful” or “whoops, I guess that’s the end of the world.”
“What?” I asked Nate. “Why did the water stop moving?”
“It’s the Red Death Tea Society again. Their Slow-storm machine is still operational.” Nate’s breath was still heaving in and out, like he was on the verge of panic. I do not like it when the world’s smartest boy panics. It panics me.
“What are they trying to do with it?” I asked.
“If they can slow time in this area, it will eventually overcome the robots in our bloodstream, and we’ll be frozen. Easy to capture. Or worse.”
“I’m not in favor of being captured or worse. Didn’t we have plans to break that machine? We should get on that, right?”
Nate nodded, breathing in, breathing out. Slowly.
“Let’s see,” he said. “If I was going to hide the machine, where would I do it?”
“Maybe make it look like a car?” I said, pointing to the cars at the far end of the parking lot. Since school wasn’t in session, there weren’t many vehicles in the parking lot, just a few cars for the groundskeepers who were working on the lawns and hedges. There was an old Chevy truck. A Ford truck with a trailer attachment for lawn-mowing equipment. A battered old Volkswagen. And a red truck with a teacup symbol painted on the side, and an exposed engine with an incredible array of weird tubes and rubber hoses, bristling with antennae that had arcs of electricity zooming between them.
“There!” I said.
“The Volkswagen?” Nate asked.
“No!” I said, adding in a punch. “The one with the teacup!”
“Oooh!” Nate said. And then he started doing that breathing again. The deep breaths, quickly taken, speedily exhaled, again and again.
“Are you okay, Nate?” I asked. “You keep—”
PHH-THOOOOEY!
Nate spit.
Tremendously.
That’s why he’d been doing the thing with the breathing; he was getting ready to spit a big loogie, using the neon-green power tongue rubber band he was wearing.
We were at least a hundred feet from the somewhat-disguised Slowstorm machine, but Nate’s wad of spit arced way up into the air, soaring through the skies, and then sloshed into the side of the Slowstorm machine with a noise like when a huge frog farts underwater.
But nothing else happened.
Except that the spit started grossly sliding down the side of the machine, and I was looking to Nate, and then back at the machine, wondering what was supposed to happen, wondering if Nate had finally failed at something.
“Wait for it,” he said.
“Wait for what?” I asked.
“Do you remember when I licked the mustard off your pants?”
“Yes,” I said, not adding that it wasn’t something anyone would ever forget, or that anyone sane would ever think to do.
“Well, the mustard was in that spit,” Nate said, as if everything was now explained, but I was wearing sopping wet clothes and standing in what amounted to a brand-new marsh, and I was on the verge of asking Nate at least fifty more questions, but then . . .
“Is mustard?” I heard. The voice came from what looked to be a floating hairball with whiskers and a furry snout.
It was Bosper.
He was paddling furiously through the water
s toward the Slowstorm machine.
“Is mustard!” he snarled. As soon as he reached shallower waters he was racing as quickly as he could, and then he was biting and snarling at the mustard-stained machine, chomping on the wires and the tubes, tearing them from their moorings, avoiding various arcs of electricity, ripping the delicate parts of the machine to bits.
“You sicced your dog on a machine?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you just walk over there and break it yourself ?”
“Because this was more adventurous.”
“Watching a terrier attack mustard-laced spit-stains isn’t a common definition of adventure.”
“Adventure is never common, Delphine,” Nate said, which was annoying, because he was right.
“The dog is attacking!” Bosper said. A few more wires were ripped loose.
Bosper snarled, “Here comes more teeth!” He tore off one of the antennae.
“The dog is a good boy!” Bosper yelled, tearing off an electrical plate and pawing at the exposed circuitry. The machine was pulsing with electricity, but slower and slower, almost entirely destroyed. Nate and I were walking closer, sloshing through the shallow water. It seemed safe enough, because the machine was almost dead, with lights blinking out, and Bosper couldn’t be mad at me anymore because I no longer had any mustard on my pants, thanks to how Nate had licked some of it off, and the rest of it had been washed away in the flooded school, as if it were the oddest washing machine of all time.
I said, “I hope Chester doesn’t hear Bosper talking.” I was looking around, trying to see where Chester might have gone. He shouldn’t have been too hard to spot, not when he was wearing that blue shirt and those yellow pants, along with his bright red socks. He normally stuck out like a parrot in a sand pile.
“He’d have to have really good hearing,” Nate said.
“Why?”
“Well, because he’s all the way up in the classrooms,” Nate said, gesturing back to the school. “But as soon as Bosper breaks that machine, Chester won’t be caught in time, and we can—”
“Oh. That’s right. You didn’t know. You were unconscious at the time, but I already saved Chester. Since he was caught in time, all I had to do was speed him up. So I gave him a ‘Speed Runner’ pill and he ran outside. He should be around here somewhere.” I was still looking for Chester. Maybe he’d run all the way home? Not a bad idea, really. I could use some “home time” myself.
“You . . . what?” Nate said. His flopping hair was halfway down over his eyes, but even so I could see them, because they’d grown suddenly large.
“I gave Chester one of your pills.”
“You . . . what?” Nate moved his hair back. Yep, big ol’ eyes.
“The ‘Speed Runner’ pills, ” I said. “I gave one to Chester. Pretty smart, huh?”
“Oh.” Nate’s voice was odd.
He turned from me and looked to Bosper, who was still tearing the Slowstorm machine to pieces, currently yelling a battle cry involving “cupcakes” and “quantum equations,” two of his favorite things. The machine was now a wreck. There’d originally been hundreds of blinking lights, but now there were no more than ten.
“Hmmm,” Nate said, grabbing a pen from his shirt pocket and doing some quick calculations on his pants, scribbling numbers and symbols and a cartoon likeness of Chester circled several times, with lightning bolts surrounding him.
“Hmmm,” Nate said.
Then, looking sharply up, Nate yelled, “BOSPER! STOP!”
Bosper looked back to us. The mustard-induced madness had faded from the terrier’s eyes, but it was now replaced with anxiety.
“The dog is not a good boy?” he whimpered in question. Behind him, the remaining lights of the Slowstorm machine winked out, one after the other, until there was only one left. It pulsed with a dull green color, slower and slower. Then it blinked red. And went black.
From somewhere in the distance, beyond the football stands, possibly three hundred yards away, I heard Chester scream.
And then there were lightning bolts crashing all over the field, crackling down from the skies and crackling back up from the ground, and the football stands exploded into bits and pieces and there was a blur of blue and yellow and red and then Chester was standing right in front of me, appearing as if from nowhere in a brutal rush of wind.
“Huh?” I said, but Chester was already gone. There was a smell of ozone in the air, and there were thousands of flickers of electricity, like snowflakes, tumbling all around.
The noises were deafening.
From everywhere there was the blur of blue and yellow and red. It was complete pandemonium. There were random explosions, like the toolshed where the lawn equipment is kept, and also a tree, and even portions of the lawn, all of them just . . . exploding. There was lightning striking all around. Bosper barking. Howling winds. Me diving for cover but not finding it, so mostly I was just sloshing around in the waters, which kept erupting in straight lines, like a gargantuan knife was cutting repeatedly through the water, and the colorful blur just wouldn’t stop; it seemed to be everywhere at all times, a keening whistle as the air itself burst into thick lines of flames, and the only thing that wasn’t a part of the chaos was Nathan Bannister.
He was just standing there.
He tapped the equations on his pants and said, “Yeah. That was gonna happen.”
Then, more lightning from the skies.
Chester was the lightning.
He was the blur of blue and yellow and red.
He was the tornado-like winds and he was the lines of fire appearing through the air. He was the explosions happening all around. Chester was everywhere, and everything. He kept running past us at speeds too quick to see, speeds that burned away the water in the parking lot, sending it skyward in bursts of billowing steam, as if Nate and I were sweltering in a colossal sauna.
“I,” Chester said, running past us. His speed left behind a thick black line of charred pavement.
“Can’t!” Chester said, zooming past us. The remains of the Slowstorm machine exploded into a thousand pieces, and tiny droplets of molten metal.
“Stop!” Chester said, racing past us at unfathomable speeds. Bosper was barking at him, spinning in circles as he tried to keep up with Chester’s pace, which was entirely futile. Chester’s speeds were simply beyond comprehension.
“Help me!” I heard Chester yell as he sped off into the distance, his speed blazing a furrow across the football yard. The goalposts at the far end were caught in bursts of lightning, and then a small grove of oak trees exploded into wooden splinters as Chester Humes raced off into the city, unable to stop his amazing run.
The silence began to settle.
Everything smelled like burning tires.
The hair on my arms was standing up.
I had the taste of dust and metal in my mouth.
“Hmm,” Nate said after Chester was gone and the storm had subsided. There were raging clouds in the distance now, though. The skies above Polt were churning with violence, spewing lightning, with storm clouds being tugged along after my speedy schoolmate as if connected with a leash.
“What . . . the . . . piffle?” I asked.
Nate said, “It’s because of the ‘Speed Runner’ pill. Chester was frozen in time when you gave it to him, so for a bit . . . after it was in his system but while the Slowstorm machine was still working . . . he was being super-charged, like when you rev an engine but the brakes are on.”
“Chester doesn’t appear to have his brakes on.”
“No,” Nate said. “The moment Bosper destroyed the Slowstorm machine, fully releasing Chester from its effects, his metabolism accelerated enormously. When the machine was still operational, it was holding him back, slowing him down to what we perceive as normal speeds. But, so much energy was building up inside him that, now that it’s been released, he’s like a supercharged race car.”
“What do we do?”
“We have to catch him. Help him. I
f we don’t . . .” Nate’s words trailed off, like they sometimes do when he’s avoiding telling me something unpleasant, but for once he was going to have to tell me the truth.
“What could happen?” I asked.
“The excess power could prove too much for Chester,” Nate said. “It would burn him up. Like a spent match.”
“We can’t let that happen,” I said. “We just can’t. But, how can we catch someone who’s moving that fast?”
“Hmmm,” Nate said, scratching his chin.
Betsy had healed enough that she could drive again, although she couldn’t shift into any of her “rocket” modes. Still, she could drive us around like a normal car, so we raced downtown as fast as we could, searching for Chester and finding him easily enough, but failing to do anything other than watching the woman get her meatball sandwich all over her white blouse as Chester raced past.
“This isn’t working!” Nate yelled, waving for me to get back into the car. We needed to go to his lab so he could invent something.
“Maybe some sort of net?” I asked as we drove along. Bosper was in the backseat, his face stuck outside the window with his fur ruffling in the wind. I’d moved Melville, still sleeping, to the front dash, making sure she wouldn’t get swept out by the breeze.
“I might be able to create a molecular bond net,” Nate said. “But, I don’t think it’s a good idea to simply catch Chester in a net. Right now, all the running he’s doing is siphoning off some of the excess energy. If we were to simply stop him . . .”
“Yeah. I see what you mean. The energy could burn him up.”
“This dog-face likes winds,” Bosper said. The winds were pushing his fur back.
“How about you invent some sort of super-treadmill?” I asked. “That way, at least Chester could run in one place, and we would know where he was.” As we drove along, we could see clear evidence of Chester’s passing. There was a whole street with trees that’d toppled over, and a wall where Chester had written, “Delphine! Help me!” possibly a hundred thousand times. I wondered how long it had taken him. Probably no more than a second.