by Paul Tobin
Nate and I both took one of the pills and it was only a matter of seconds before we quit sneezing. After that, it was only a matter of dealing with my very messy nose. Nate pretended not to notice. I was quite pleased there was no footage.
After that, the chase became increasingly frantic. The cat hairs were showing up more and more frequently, with the tiny robots constantly bringing them back, and every two or three seconds Nate was saying that it meant we were close. I’d suspected we might be, since I was starting to see crushed cars, abandoned motorcycles, people wondering what had just happened (giant cats being even more confusing when you can’t see them), and a clothing store that had been entirely destroyed. People were running out of buildings. People were running inside the buildings. There was a man staring in disbelief at his crushed car, occasionally looking up to the sky, possibly thinking some meteor had struck from above. There was a family of five holding hands, their backs flat against the outside wall of the Bossa Nova Dance Hall. There were police cars and policemen and ambulances everywhere, but since nobody knew what was causing the chaos, the police were directing people in all directions, talking on radios, and all but spinning in circles. There were cracks in the street. And claw marks. There were broken windows in the buildings. There were awnings torn to shreds. Plus, there was a deep hole dug in the soil of Beaton Park, which I guess was the closest to a pan of kitty litter that Proton was able to find.
“Better get that formula ready,” I told Nate. “We’re getting closer.”
“I’m trying!” Nate said. “I really made the secret code complex. I’ve never seen a code this intricate. Wow … I’m really smart!”
“Yay, you!” I said, with deadpan sarcasm.
“Oh, thanks!” Nate said, quite happy. “You really mean it?”
I did not. “Sure!” I lied, because when you’re chasing a giant cat there’s no time for divisions in the team.
Nate commented, “This code, this formula. It’s hauntingly familiar.”
It was at that moment that our chase came to an end. An abrupt one. Our car was suddenly thumped across the entire street, and we rolled over onto the sidewalk and then partially into a store’s window display.
“Ow,” Betsy said, and then, “Is everyone okay?”
“Yes,” I said, because I’d been absolutely encapsulated within a bevy of air bags that had deployed during impact. It felt like I was inside a bag of marshmallows.
“Deflate air bags!” Nate yelled out, and suddenly the air bags were gone and I was upside down in an upside-down car.
“Betsy,” I said. “Are you okay?” She didn’t look okay. There was a big dent in her side and her roof had partially collapsed and she was scraped everywhere and her windshield was broken out.
“No problems!” she said. But her voice was strained. Nate and I crawled out from inside. Betsy began wiggling back and forth, like a turtle on its back. I was thinking about helping, mostly wondering how I could help, when a grappling hook shot out from near her front bumper and sunk into the ceiling like a bullet. Then, like a winch, it pulled Betsy upright and she was able to regain her feet. I mean, her wheels, of course.
But that dent in her door was horrible. A big slash mark, with deep gouges from the cat’s claws, right on the painting of Einstein. The door had entirely buckled. Then, amazingly, it began to heal. The dent (pop, krrunnk, thoop) popped back out, and the slash marks filled in, and the painting of Einstein was like new again. Even the windshield began to repair itself.
“Whoa,” I said.
Nate explained, “Betsy is constructed of realignable atoms. She can repair almost any damage.”
“It’s exhausting, though,” Betsy wheezed.
“You rest,” I told her, patting her on the door. “Nate and I will take care of the giant cat.”
“We will?” Nate said. The two of us were crawling out through the broken store window. “How?”
“First, we need to find Proton,” I said. “Shouldn’t we have been able to see him when he attacked? I mean, look at us. We have the red goggles.” I tapped on my goggles.
“I’m afraid Proton is becoming more invisible,” Nate said. He sounded almost worried.
I, on the other hand, was scowling. “How can you be more invisible than invisible?” Scowling seemed like the thing to do. Especially since, if Proton was extra-invisible, that meant he might be extra-right-there-in-front-of-me-and-about-to-attack.
Nate said, “Well, as you know, the human eye can detect wavelengths from about four hundred to seven hundred nanometers.”
I said, “Yes, of course I knew that.” I hadn’t known that, and didn’t even really know what it meant.
“But there’s actually a far wider spectrum. Our goggles, for instance, let us perceive a range of wavelengths between two hundred and nine hundred nanometers.”
“That’s quite excellent,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Unfortunately, Proton is now operating on a fluctuating spectrum of unstable frequency.”
I said, “Gosh,” because, well, I had to say something.
“He might be up to light wave emissions of fourteen hundred nanometers at one moment, and then as low as twenty in the next.”
“Astounding,” I said. “And that would mean … ” I let my words trail off so that Nate would finish them, and then hopefully I would finally understand what he was talking about.
“Yes?” he said, waiting for me to finish my thought. So, I’d fallen for my own trap. Unfortunate.
“Well, the obvious,” I said.
“Exactly!” Nate said, looking at me with newfound (and completely unwarranted) admiration. “Proton is moving even farther away from the visible spectrum, not only outside the range of our eyes, but outside the current range of our goggles as well.”
“Well, what do we do about that?” I asked.
“Adjust our goggles again,” he said, reaching out and tapping several times on the sides of my glasses. Other colors began appearing in my vision. I cannot name these other colors. I simply can’t. They have no names. If they did have names, they would be something like “crazy” or “eerie” or “okay, that’s making me a little nauseated.”
“There,” Nate said, adjusting his own goggles. “Now we should be able to see Proton again. But this change is interesting.”
“It’s interesting, all right.” I meant something else. Something with curse words involved.
“I mean, it shouldn’t be happening.”
I said, “No, Nate. It shouldn’t be happening.” He thought I was agreeing with him, instead of yelling at him. For a genius, he’s not very perceptive.
He said, “An outside force is again intruding in my experiment, pushing it past the boundaries I set.”
I said, “You had boundaries? You made a giant invisible monster cat menace and you call that staying within boundaries?”
But Nate wasn’t listening to me. He was deep in thought, walking along the sidewalk, tapping a finger on the side of his head and writing some equations on his pants. I had to wave a hand in front of his face to get his attention before he stepped out into traffic or, worse, got eaten or stepped on by Proton.
“Hmm? Oh, Delphine. Sorry, I was just thinking of somatotropic cells and mitogens.”
“Sure. Me too. But, for right now, and forgive me if this is a little off topic, but … remember that giant cat we’re hunting? The one that’s hunting us?”
“Of course. That’s what I’m talking about. Growth hormones. My calculations were correct. I’m sure of it. Proton shouldn’t be reacting this way. This is the work of the Red Death Tea Society!” He smacked his fist into his hand. I’d never seen anyone do that outside of a cartoon.
“Everything we’ve done is for nothing,” he said. “The statistics are meaningless. The numbers won’t add up. Chaos has become structure and structure has become chaos. The math here is … it’s …” He trailed off and scowled. He took a deep breath. He looked me in
the eye.
“This is ugly math,” he said.
I thought about asking what he meant by “ugly math,” but instead I just nodded. It seemed to calm Nate, a little. He gave a smile. It was small. But real.
“Why are they doing all this?” I asked. “What’s their purpose?”
“They’re hoping I won’t be able to control Proton, and, well, Proton will squash me. Maculte and the Red Death Tea Society see me as the only real obstacle to their taking over the world, so …”
“I got it. If you’re just a stain on a giant cat’s paw, you won’t be so troublesome. But what I mean is … why not just, I don’t know, shoot you or something? Run you down with a car? Something normal?”
“No challenge in that. It would be like me sitting around all day solving how two plus two equals four. Where’s the drama?”
“That’s crazy. These guys sound crazy.”
“Statistically, everyone’s a little crazy, but you’re right. I built a series of fail-safes into the Proton experiment. Buffer zones that would keep the experiment from getting too far out of hand.”
“Hmm,” I said, because it was better than pointing out how, statistically speaking, when you make a giant cat, things are already out of hand.
“But Maculte and the Red Death Tea Society somehow removed my buffers and overrode my safety nets, sending this experiment into a danger zone.”
“Hmm,” I said, because it was better than pointing out that while tigers are just big cats, they are generally labeled as danger zones. Making a cat that was ten times bigger than a tiger is generally considered as, well … it’s just not generally considered.
“It’s like I was talking about before,” Nate said. “About how Victor Frankenstein was destroyed by his own creation. Maculte wants Proton to destroy me, so he’s making him even more dangerous.”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of a super-invisible Frankenstein, which was not only a little scary but also a bit awesome.
My phone beeped. I looked at it. Liz was texting me, still wanting to know if I would be over after supper. I gave her a quick no, despite how I wanted to talk about the whole day, everything that had happened, everything that was still happening, and I wanted to talk about how dangerous everything was. I wanted to talk about jealous cars, and I wanted to talk about how NOT attractive Susan Heller is. Not even a little. I wanted to talk about the Legendary Credit Card. I wanted to talk about Nate an awful lot, and I wanted to talk about wanting to talk about Nate so much, and if that was weird. But I was too busy right then, and I was also too scared right then. Some of those conversations were more frightening than fighting a giant cat. So I put my phone away.
“We have to find a way to stop Proton,” Nate said. He was oblivious to all the emotions rampaging around in my head. I was thankful for that. It would give me time to deal with them.
“We do,” I said. “This is getting dangerous. It’s almost like you shouldn’t have created a monster in the first place.” I tried to put a little extra oomph into my words, because Nate sometimes has trouble with sarcasm.
“That’s silly,” he said, making me wonder if he’d invented an anti-sarcasm force field, because it hadn’t even come close to him. “The Red Death Tea Society would have been a problem either way. They’re the real threat.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “And they sent tea to my mom. And all my friends. And half the people I know. Why would they do that?”
“Intimidation.”
“Could it be poisoned?” I instantly started to sweat. It was the first time I thought of how the tea might be poisoned.
“No. Definitely not. Tea is sacred to Maculte and his people. They wouldn’t ever even consider making anything but highly excellent tea.” Then Nate sighed and said, “Oh, enough of all this. I suppose we should save the city.”
“We should probably do that,” I agreed.
By then we were walking around, looking. We couldn’t see Proton anywhere on the street, not even with our newly adjusted goggles, but there was plenty of evi-dence that he had been there. There was a broken fire hydrant that was spraying water, and there were more crushed cars, and there was a crowd of people speculating about earthquakes, and police cars were arriving, and there was an ambulance. The smell of spilled gasoline was everywhere. Car alarms were going off. People were taking photos and making phone calls. A store alarm was buzzing. There were two dogs barking in a manner that clearly said they weren’t quite sure what they were barking at. Several people were staring out from the huge display window of the car dealership across the street. The whole block was eerily lit by moving spotlights coming from the roof of the building, shining high into the clouds above and reflecting down with flashes of dazzling light.
And there was Proton.
He was atop the building, staring at one of the spotlights as it swiveled back and forth. He was looking up to the illuminated clouds and then down to the spotlight, occasionally passing a paw between the two, working out some train of thought in his head.
He tilted his head one way, and then the other.
Then he batted the spotlight free of its moorings and sent it flying out across the street.
“Look out!” I yelled, tackling Nate aside just as the spotlight smashed to the sidewalk, causing a noise that I could actually feel (it felt like a wind gust full of baseballs) and sending glass and metal fragments scattering everywhere. The two dogs began barking even louder (because, I guess, now they had something to bark at) and another car alarm started going off a block down, because car alarms clearly just like to make noise.
Proton was now stalking along the top of the car dealership, padding softly to another of the spotlights. There were five of them in all. It looked as if Proton had decided they were the enemy.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “But I need to get up there, fast.”
“No problem,” Nate said, scrambling to his feet. “Here! Take my rocket belt!” He quickly took off his belt and put it around my waist.
“Have you ever used a rocket belt before?” he asked as he cinched it tight.
“Oh, of course,” I said. “All the time. Practically since birth.” It wouldn’t have taken a genius to detect the sarcasm in my voice.
“Great!” Nate said, absolutely not detecting the sarcasm in my voice. “Here, I’ll turn it on!” He flicked a switch and I shot into the air like a rocket, specifically like one of those rockets that are not in any particular control, and are just whooshing all over the place, screaming, flailing their arms and legs. Exactly like one of those rockets.
I dodged a light pole. A traffic light. A building. The street. Everything was a blur. How was I supposed to control the belt? There didn’t seem to be any way to vary the speed or change direction, which were two of my primary concerns at that moment. I zoomed through a flock of pigeons and then took a quick (and rather painful) trip through the branches of a maple tree, after which I randomly swooped lower and skidded my feet along the street while desperately trying to land, or to kick Nate as hard as I could. I failed on both counts and soared back up into the air, but, eventually, after twenty seconds and nine million “piffles,” I began to understand that I could direct my flight by leaning in one direction or another, and that variations in the way I held my arms could control my speed, height, and direction.
I gained control and zoomed out over the street just in time to see Proton smash the second of the spotlights down off the roof of the car dealership. Nate was running around on the street below, dodging crowds of curious onlookers.
“There you are!” he said, calling out to me. “I thought you’d gone home or something!”
“Gone home? Why would I go home? I’m fighting a giant cat!” Then, after having said that, I realized that fighting a giant cat is actually an incredibly good reason to go home. But, no time for talking, thinking, or doing the smart thing and going home. I soared up to the spotlight that was the farthest away from Proton and landed next to it.
It was bigger than me and was swiveling at random, sending a beam of light up onto the bottom of the clouds. It took me a second to understand the mechanism (either that, or I broke it) but I was soon able to direct the beam onto the street below. Proton stared at it. Fascinated.
“What are you doing?” Nate called out.
“Wait for it!” I yelled back. Oh, did that feel good!
Proton kept staring at the beam of light, which was essentially a giant version of a laser pointer. And while Proton hadn’t been kept in check by Nate’s laser pointer back at his house, I had a slightly different plan in mind.
I hurried on to the next spotlight. It was harder to move, but (huffing and straining and adding in a little bit of my rocket belt’s power) I soon had it pointed where I wanted, right at the big front display window of the car dealership, which was almost fifty feet long and twenty feet high. Proton became even more fascinated. If I could add in that third spotlight, I was sure he’d go down there. Unfortunately, he was standing right next to the third spotlight. To get to it, I’d have to get within range of Proton’s claws, which meant I’d have to be very sneaky.
I began tiptoeing, moving slowly, edging my way toward the spotlight. Proton seemed even bigger than I remembered him, but I decided it was just because I was absolutely terrified. I was twenty feet away from Proton, which, according to my math, was well within his range of pouncing on me and doing the sorts of things that cats do to the creatures they pounce on.
“Rowrr?” Proton said. He looked my way. I smiled. Monsters do not attack people who smile. This is a well-known fact.
“Rrrrrr,” Proton said. It sounded like he was about to dispute a well-known fact.
“Good kitty,” I said, with all the sincerity I could muster, which frankly wasn’t very much. I edged closer, closer. Proton considered me some more, and then looked back down to the lights shining on the street and the big display window. He decided the lights were more interesting. I did not take offense to that.
Soon, I was at the third spotlight. Proton was only a couple of feet away from me, so close that I could feel his rumbling breath, even the heat of it. I thought of how easily he’d batted the spotlights free of their steel moorings, how he’d ripped into the car door, and what would happen to me if Proton attacked. I was sweating. I wanted to go home and take a shower and then pull up my blankets and read a book and have some cake and listen to music and be anywhere else doing anything else but standing next to a giant predator.