Target: Nobody

by Tommy Donbavand

  I noticed that he had lipstick marks all over his cheeks. “Are you sure the donkey was the only reason you fell behind?”

  Fangs winked. “Someone had to apologize to the bridesmaids you almost ran over.” He smiled. “Now where’s Marmalade?”

  “Somewhere down there,” I said.

  “Then let’s go,” said Fangs.

  We stepped into the tunnel and let the door slam shut behind us. I pulled the torch from my utility belt and switched it on.

  “Cube’s energy line is here,” said Claret, “but it’s very faint. The poor fellow must be exhausted.”

  “He’s not the only one,” said Fangs. “I had to run up at least half of that hill.”

  “Well, we’re heading back down now,” I pointed out as the tunnel twisted to the left and spiralled downwards.

  Eventually, we reached another door. This one, thankfully, only had a standard lock. “We must be right underneath the Acropolis,” I whispered as I picked the lock with one of my claws.

  “Not a bad place for a hideout,” said Fangs.

  As soon as the lock clicked, Claret pressed his hand against the door and made to push it open. Fangs grabbed his wrist to stop him.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed.

  “Going to find Cube,” said Claret. “His energy line leads right inside.”

  “You’re getting slack in your old age,” said Fangs. “There could be anything waiting for us behind that door.”

  “Like what?”

  Fangs rolled his eyes. “At the very best, a legion of Nobody’s skeletons will be waiting to strip us of our flesh and dance around in our skin.”

  Claret considered the suggestion. “So what do we do?”

  “Well, why don’t you finally prove you can do this astral-projection thing you’ve been boasting about and find a spider to possess for a look around?”

  “I’m not sure that would work,” said Claret, looking uncomfortable. “I’ve never tried it underground before, you see. I don’t know if I’d be able to achieve the necessary level of cosmic karma. It’s probably best if we think of another way.”

  “Not to worry,” I said quickly to avoid an argument. “We’ve got everything we need for reconnaissance right here.”

  “We have?” said Fangs.

  I nodded. “Can I borrow your sunglasses for a minute?”

  Fangs slid his precious sunglasses off and handed them over. I snapped them in half.

  “What are you doing?” my boss cried.

  “I need the camera,” I explained, carefully fishing out the tiny lens.

  “And you couldn’t get it without breaking my glasses?” Fangs’s voice echoed back along the stone corridor.

  “Ssh,” said Claret.

  “Don’t you shush me, old man,” Fangs spat. “This is your fault. You owe me a new pair of sunglasses.”

  “You can have mine, if you like,” said Claret, offering his rose-tinted pair.

  “They’ll do for now,” said Fangs. “But don’t think this is over.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt about that,” muttered Claret.

  The two vampires glared at each other. Meanwhile, I pulled two of Cube’s gadgets – the Bat ‘n’ Ball and the Sticky Soap – from my utility belt. I planned on using the soap to stick the camera from Fangs’s sunglasses to the Bat ‘n’ Ball.

  Once the camera was secure, I launched the Bat ‘n’ Ball control software on my Smartphone and then I popped the ball through the gap between the door and the frame. It flapped its bat’s wings and soared up into the air. Now we had a bird’s eye view of whatever was beyond the tunnel. It was a vast underground cavern.

  “Funny,” said Claret. “I can’t see an army of skin-stealing skeletons.”

  Fangs gave a snarl. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a huge metallic pole spinning in the centre of the room.

  I swung the camera in for a closer look. “It’s a drill!” I exclaimed. “A drill as big as a skyscraper.” I angled the camera down to see where the drill ended – and my jaw dropped open. There, cut into the floor of the cavern, was a hole the size of a lake. The gigantic drill disappeared down into it like a train vanishing into a tunnel – if train tunnels were ever vertical.

  I flew the Bat ‘n’ Ball down into the hole.

  “It goes down for miles!” said Fangs in amazement.

  After emerging from the hole, the camera picked out someone moving through a door at the far side of the cavern. I instructed the ball to flap over for a closer look and almost cried with joy.

  It was Cube!

  Tuesday 1617 hours: Below the Acropolis, Lindos, Rhodes

  We slipped through the door and made our way around the outside of the cavern as quietly as we could just in case there were any Bone Boys hanging around. The huge drill bit was even more impressive close up. It hung from a large motor built into the ceiling of the cave, and rotated, slowly but purposely, as it pushed down into the hole. Next to it, also hanging from the ceiling, were a dozen giant balls made from clear plastic.

  I pulled out my Smartphone and took a couple of photographs of the drill and the balls. The pictures might be useful as evidence later.

  We paused at the door on the other side of the cavern while Fangs ran his fingertips around the doorframe to check for booby traps. I activated the video camera function on my phone and held it up. By angling the screen, I was able to examine the layout of the room beyond. It was a laboratory filled with glass jars, Bunsen burners and many other items of high-tech scientific machinery. There was no one else in the room aside from Cube.

  “It’s all clear,” whispered Fangs.

  I burst into the laboratory and flung my arms around Cube, hugging him tightly. “Professor!” I cried.

  “Puppy!” Cube hugged me back. “How did you find me?”

  “They called in an expert,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Cube peered over the top of his glasses. “Is that … is that Claret Enigma?”

  “It certainly is, my old friend,” said Claret, hurrying over to shake hands. “As soon as they said you were missing, I came to help. And it worked! I followed your energy line all the way here.”

  “I helped as well,” said Fangs, stepping between Cube and his dad. “There’s no substitute for good, old-fashioned spy work.”

  “It doesn’t matter who found him,” I said, grinning. “He’s safe now.”

  “Thank you,” exclaimed Cube. “Thank you all.”

  I threw my arms around the professor again. I was delighted he was unharmed, although there was something different about him. His head was no longer square! Cube’s skull was now the shape of a rugby ball.

  “What have they done to you?” I asked.

  “I rounded out the edges a little,” said a voice.

  We spun round to see four of the Bone Boys standing in the doorway behind us, each holding a hefty bone club. They seemed to be a little worse for wear after their encounter with us at the beach: one was missing an arm while another had a skull wedged inside his ribcage.

  But it wasn’t the skeletons who had spoken. I was confused until the air in front of us began to shimmer and a ghost materialized. Completely transparent, he wore a well-tailored suit, and had thick, slicked-back hair. He matched the photograph Feline had shown us at the MP2 Headquarters.

  Mr Nobody.

  “You can tell your skinless wonders to put their clubs away,” said Fangs. “They don’t scare us.”

  “Actually, they scare me a bit,” said Claret, slowly raising his hands in the air. “I think it’s only fair to tell you that if you want to dance around in my skin, you may need to find a belt; my skin is getting a little saggy in my old age.”

  “Tell me what you’ve done to Cube!” I demanded.

  Mr Nobody smiled with his transparent lips. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “The professor was less than keen to help me at first,” he said. “So for every hour he withheld his co-operation, I rounded out the corners of his head a
little.”

  “I could feel my intelligence seeping away,” Cube groaned. “In the end, I had to do what he said, or I wouldn’t have been able to think straight! But I don’t know the whole plan. He didn’t let me in on that.”

  “Why do you want Cube?” Fangs asked the ghost. “What’s your plan?”

  “I’d tell you exactly what I’m doing, Agent Enigma,” he said. “But I think you’d find it more exciting if I showed you.”

  The skeleton guards handcuffed our hands behind our backs – using their own bones – then marched us out into the vast chamber. Mr Nobody walked ahead, his feet not quite making contact with the ground.

  “You will have noticed my rather impressive drilling operation,” he said. “Although, that is only stage one of my scheme. Allow me to show you stage two…”

  He nodded to one of the skeletons, who opened a metal doorway I hadn’t noticed before. There was a HISS! and clouds of icy air wafted out, temporarily obscuring our view of what was inside.

  Then we saw it. Lying on a table made from ice was … Mr Nobody – or, rather, Mr Nobody’s body. It was dressed exactly the same as the ghost hovering beside us.

  “It almost looks as though I’m asleep, doesn’t it?” said the ghost of Mr Nobody, as he gazed lovingly down at his body. He attempted to stroke the hair of the corpse, but his spectral hand simply passed right through the head.

  “You’re not asleep, though, are you,” said Fangs. “You’re dead. Mr Nobody has no body.”

  I expected Mr Nobody to react angrily to Fangs’s comment, but his left eye only twitched as he forced a smile. “For now,” he said.

  One of the skeletons closed the door to keep in the frozen air. Mr Nobody wafted away across the cavern again, and a nudge in the back from the skeletons told us we were meant to follow.

  “I always expected to be killed one day,” Mr Nobody told us. “When you work in crime, it’s something of an occupational hazard. I did, however, assume I’d go out in a battle with the police rather than an unfortunate accident with a door to a bank vault.”

  “That must have been a crushing blow,” quipped Fangs.

  I saw Mr Nobody’s eye twitch again, only through the back of his see-through head this time, which looked very weird.

  “I had a team of doctors on standby for such an occurrence,” the ghost continued. “They repaired the damage to my internal organs and placed my body in its current cryogenically frozen state. Ready for when I return to it.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I cried. “You can’t bring the dead back to life – not unless you come back as a zombie.”

  Mr Nobody spun in the air to face me. “Miss Brown,” he snapped, “I have an IQ greater than Albert Einstein. When I come back, it will not be as a shuffling monster whose only thoughts are where to get a nice juicy brain for breakfast and whether my arms will stay attached to their sockets for the rest of the day.”

  “Puppy’s right, Nobody,” said Claret. “I’ve been involved with the spookier side of the supernatural world ever since I retired, and I know that once you’ve been separated from your body, there’s no going back in there. The technology simply doesn’t exist to bring someone back from the dead.”

  “You’re correct, of course,” said Mr Nobody. “Such technology doesn’t exist – yet. And that’s why I needed the help of Professor Cubit.”

  “Now I know you’re insane,” snapped Fangs. “Cube’s good at what he does – and I never thought I’d have to say that in front of him – but even he can’t build something that will bring you back from the dead.”

  Mr Nobody threw back his transparent head and laughed. “Oh, I know that,” he said. “That sort of technology is centuries away.”

  “So what is it that you want Cube to do?” I asked.

  Mr Nobody smiled. “I want him to help me speed up time.”

  Tuesday 1650 hours: Nobody’s Lair, Lindos, Rhodes

  No one spoke for a few seconds. We simply stared at Mr Nobody in amazement.

  “How can you possibly speed up time?” I asked finally.

  “Allow me to demonstrate,” Mr Nobody replied. He turned to the nearest skeleton. “Get Marmalade.”

  A few seconds later, the guard returned with Marmalade Springs. “Which one of them was it?” Mr Nobody asked her.

  Marmalade looked from Fangs to his dad and back again. “That one,” she said, pointing at Claret. “They both knocked me to the ground, but it was the older one who took the code from me.”

  “Search him,” Mr Nobody ordered his skeletons. Two rifled through Claret’s pockets until they found the code for the box we’d opened at the airport. Meanwhile, three other Bone Boys wheeled in the crate of hamsters and a portable barbecue filled with searing hot coals.

  Marmalade tapped the code into the keypad on the crate. She carefully lifted the lid and we could suddenly hear the thousands of hamsters squeaking inside. She chose one, then shut the crate again.

  “Is the fluid ready?” Mr Nobody asked.

  Cube nodded reluctantly. A skeleton scurried into the lab and returned holding a spray bottle very similar to the one we had found in Cube’s kitchen.

  “I’ve improved the mixture,” Cube said. “But I can’t promise that it will last longer than the previous versions—”

  “Take it,” Mr Nobody told Marmalade, cutting Cube off. She snatched the bottle and sprayed the hamster in her hand with pink liquid. Then she tossed the hamster into the flames of the barbecue.

  “No!” I cried. But I needn’t have worried – because there, scuttling happily over the red hot coals, was a completely unharmed hamster.

  Marmalade plucked it from the inferno with a pair of tongs and placed it on the ground. The creature looked around for a moment, then twitched its whiskers and ran off.

  “Of course,” I said, realization dawning. “Cube’s heat-resistant cooking spray!”

  “Well done, Miss Brown,” said Mr Nobody. “And to think, I only know about it because Professor Cubit boasted about his discovery on an Internet cooking forum.”

  Cube’s rounder-than-normal cheeks flushed red. “I didn’t think there’d be a use for it at MP1, so I decided to share it with my fellow amateur chefs.”

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” said Fangs. “Being able to heat hamsters doesn’t give you the ability to speed up time.”

  “Oh, but it does, Agent Enigma,” Mr Nobody said. He floated over to the giant drill. “I have now drilled further into the earth than anyone has ever done before. In fact – right to the earth’s core.”

  Claret’s eyes bulged. “But that’s imp—”

  Mr Nobody held up a hand to silence him. “If one more person claims what I am doing is impossible, I will explode!”

  “Yeah, well, that’ll be you all over,” Fangs quipped. “All over your lair.”

  Another eye twitch, then the ghostly villain continued to rant. “I have drilled to the earth’s core, and I can speed up time with hamsters!” He paused to take a deep breath and control his temper.

  “You see, these are Syrian racing hamsters,” said Mr Nobody, gesturing towards the crate. “Every one of them – in each of the ten shipments I have received – has been trained to run in one specific direction. The same direction in which the earth spins.”

  I glanced nervously at Fangs. I didn’t like where this was going.

  “I intend to drop a million heat-resistant hamsters into the earth’s core,” announced Mr Nobody, his eyes twinkling with delight. “There, they will run as one, speeding up the rotation of the earth and therefore time itself. Months will pass in a matter of days, decades within a week – entire centuries will whizz by. Then, when science has invented a way to return my body back from the dead, I shall return the earth to its standard pace and rise once more from beyond the grave!”

  There was a slight pause and then the skeletons began to applaud, their flesh-free hands clacking together like snooker balls.

  CLICK! CLACK! CRACK!<
br />
  “It’ll never work,” said Fangs.

  Mr Nobody laughed. “Didn’t you feel the rumble earlier today? That was my first test run using just three thousand hamsters. I sped up time for ninety seconds. Imagine what a million or more hamsters will do!”

  “That’s what happened to us at the airport,” I said. “Time skipped forward! But you can’t do it. Billions of people will have their lives cut short.”

  “So?” Mr Nobody sneered. “What is important is that someone invents the necessary machine to return me to my body, and quickly.”

  “Well, I won’t stand for it,” Claret said. “It’s not up to you to decide how quickly other people live their lives. If you want to continue with this wicked scheme, you’ll have to get through me first.”

  “And me!” said Fangs, stepping up to stand beside his dad.

  “Me too,” I said, falling into line.

  “Me as well!” said Cube, joining us and accidentally knocking his head against mine. “Sorry,” he said. “Not used to this new shape yet.”

  Mr Nobody sighed hard. “So be it,” he said. “I was going to allow you all to live out the rest of your lives – albeit at a greatly increased pace. But after that little display, I’ve changed my mind. Cube’s usefulness is at an end, Enigma and the werewolf are annoying me – and I can’t take looking at whatever it is that old bloke is wearing one moment longer.”

  “Now, look here—” Claret protested.

  “Bring me a ball!” Nobody shouted.

  A team of three skeletons ran to take up places at various workstations around the cavern and set to work operating buttons and levers. Alarms blared and lights flashed as the giant drill bit was lifted out of its hole.

  Two of the Bone Boys opened up the crate again and began to spray the hamsters inside with Cube’s heat-resistant liquid. There was a huge tank of it just inside the door to the laboratory.