by Henry Clark
Freak and I winced as the sandbag hit Took Lane, the last street before Hellsboro, and burst with a sickening splat!
“If he decides he doesn’t need a hostage any longer—” I said, leaving the thought unfinished as I suddenly got a lump in my throat.
Abruptly, the Omaha dropped. Fiona screamed. The balloon plummeted to within fifty feet of the ground, then Disin fired the gas jet full throttle and their descent slowed. After a moment, the balloon began to rise.
“Are you okay?” Freak shouted to Fiona. She shakily waved and nodded. We had gotten close enough to see small gestures. “What just happened?” Freak said, turning to me. “Why’d they drop?”
I tried to figure it out. I looked at the ground, where Took Lane was gliding by below us and the border of Hellsboro was rapidly approaching. I saw smoke curl from a Hellsboro fissure, and I knew.
“It’ll happen to us, too!” I shrieked, jumping for the gas jet and pulling it down just in time. A tower of flame shot upward, heating the air above us.
We crossed the border between Sunnyside and Hellsboro. The balloon bobbed a bit, but it didn’t drop as far as the Omaha had, because we had raised the temperature of the air inside it.
“The air above Hellsboro is warmer than the air above the surrounding countryside,” I shouted, loud enough for Fiona to hear, because I hoped she’d appreciate how I was thinking the way she did. “A hot air balloon only stays up if the air inside it is much warmer than the air outside it. Hellsboro is a seriously bad place for ballooning.”
We were now only thirty seconds behind the Omaha. Both balloons were level at two hundred feet. Fiona suddenly started screaming at us.
“Go up! Go up! The two of you! You have to climb!”
“Shut up!” barked Disin. “Or you’ll join that sandbag!”
“She wants our balloon to go higher,” Freak said. “Maybe she thinks we can come down on top of him!”
“No, that’s not what she’s saying—look at what she’s doing!”
I pointed. Fiona, the girl who was terrified of heights, was climbing up the rigging. She was trying to tangle herself in one of the ropes. She was looking upward at the underside of the balloon. She had given up coherent speech in favor of whimpering. Still, I thought she was incredibly brave. Then Disin stood up on the edge of the basket opposite her and grabbed one of the ropes, and I knew what was about to happen.
“We have to climb!” I screamed. “Not the balloon! Us! Up the ropes! He’s going to drop the baskets!”
Disin had picked Alf’s pocket. He had the remote-control device that disconnected the baskets from the balloons. Alf had no idea which balloon Disin might try to escape in, so the remote, I decided, must drop both baskets simultaneously.
Our balloon’s basket was about to fall two hundred feet to the smoldering surface of Hellsboro.
Freak and I scrambled to get ourselves into the rigging. We hauled ourselves up the ropes, trying to figure out how high we had to go before we were safe. I swung from rope to rope, trying to convince myself it was no worse than playing on monkey bars.
I looked over at the Omaha. Disin was about five feet above the edge of his basket. He was leaning into the center, reaching for something.
“What’s he doing?” demanded Freak.
Disin snagged what he was reaching for. It was a blue plastic handle attached to a cord that disappeared into the Omaha’s envelope.
“PARACHUTE VALVE!” Freak and I shouted together. It was the valve that opened a flap in the balloon to let hot air out. It was good to have if you needed to make a quick emergency landing.
I looked around for ours. It was midway between Freak and me. Neither one of us could reach it.
Disin dug into his coat pocket and pulled out the remote. Unintentionally, he also pulled out a handkerchief. The handkerchief snagged one additional item. It looked, to me, about the size and shape of the box containing the zucchini crayon. It came out with the handkerchief and fell into the basket below. Disin, I could tell, hadn’t noticed. If he had, he wouldn’t have done what he did next.
He pressed the button on the remote and blew the baskets off the balloons.
“LOOK OUT!” Freak and I screamed at each other.
The bolts exploded. It was as though four M-80 firecrackers had gone off simultaneously at the four corners of each basket. Our basket, with its burner and propane tank, fell away, hit Hellsboro, and exploded. The Omaha’s basket simultaneously fell, hit, and rolled without exploding. Both balloons rose rapidly and started to spin.
The motion made me dizzy, but I managed to focus on the Omaha as it swept past. Fiona and Disin still clung to its ropes. Fiona was shrieking. Disin opened the parachute valve, and the balloon began to descend. Rodmore Chemical was dead ahead.
“Is he going to land on the roof?” I shouted.
“Looks like!”
We, on the other hand, looked like we were going to sail right over Rodmore and crash and burn on the far side of Hellsboro.
“Parachute valve!” I bellowed at Freak, above the sound of rushing wind. He nodded and lunged for it. His fingers just missed it and he lost his grip.
“Freak!” I screamed as I saw him drop.
He fell five feet and caught the last possible rope between him and Hellsboro. I reached down my hand for him but he was too far away.
“Valve!” he hollered up at me.
The parachute valve was beyond his reach. It was up to me.
I swung once or twice to build up momentum. Monkey bars! I reminded myself, and I let go.
I’d never felt more like a monkey in my life. I caught the valve and my full weight came down on it. I dropped three feet and felt something give, high up in the balloon. It was the lid of the flush tank opening. The Dear John began to drop.
I dangled from the valve and watched as Disin maneuvered the misshapen remains of the Omaha like a hang glider. The rapidly deflating balloon landed on the roof of Rodmore’s main building and was carried along by the breeze.
Disin scrambled to his feet, still clutching one of the ropes. He caught an upright vent pipe, wrapped the rope around it, and stopped the balloon before it could go over the edge. This was good, since Fiona was still tangled in the balloon’s ropes and would have gone over with it.
We hit the roof moments later. Freak hit first and rolled, taking the impact in his shoulders. I came down next to him, and yards and yards of porcelain-white fabric came down on top of us.
After lying there unmoving for a moment or two, I staggered to my feet and tried to find my way out from under the fabric. I thrashed around a bit and finally found an opening. Freak emerged a second or two after I did.
We were surrounded by doghats.
CHAPTER
25
I Get Killed
You’ll enjoy being zombie workers,” Edward Disin informed us as we walked beside him along the balcony in the huge underground room with the icy wall. “Our surveys indicate one hundred percent job satisfaction. At least, we haven’t had any complaints.” He chuckled, and it sounded like razor blades going around in a blender.
After the balloons had crashed, the doghats had grabbed Freak, Fiona, and me and marched us into the depths of the building. Disin had joined us a few minutes later and had announced his intention of strapping unlimited-plan cell phones to our heads and force-feeding us Piggie-O’s—the bacon-flavored breakfast cereal from Agra Nation®—until we were as receptive to his mind control as everybody else.
“But before we get to that,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “I’m going to let you witness the opening of the portal. I need somebody staring in wide-eyed wonder, but all my subordinates have other assignments. I need an appreciative audience, even if it’s only infants.”
“We’re not infants,” growled Freak.
“By my standards you are. And I see Alf used my prejudice against me to put me off my guard. That won’t happen again. You’re infants, but you’re very bright infants.”
>
“And you’re very important,” I said. “And by important, of course, I mean stupid.”
Disin no longer looked like Treasury Agent North, although he still wore North’s rumpled suit and tie. He had pulled off his wig and peeled what looked like a thin layer of chewing gum off his face. He now looked pretty much like the man in the first photo we had seen of him. Like somebody you wouldn’t get into a car with if he offered you a ride. Even if it was raining. Or hailing.
“Compared to me, Alexander the Great was merely mediocre,” he said. He waved his cigar in the direction of the icy wall. “I didn’t just conquer a world; I unified it. I unified it and got everybody in it to speak the same language. The immediate savings on dual-language road signs was tremendous.”
“Everybody in Indorsia speaks English?” Fiona asked. We were walking a few paces behind Disin. As infants, we apparently didn’t rate handcuffs or any other form of restraint. In front of Disin was the woman he called Jackal. She had a pistol in a holster on her hip. Walking behind us was the man we once knew as Doberman. He had a semiautomatic rifle slung over one shoulder. He had bruises on either side of his head, as though a sliding door had recently closed repeatedly on him. Disin no longer addressed him as Doberman. He called him Jervis. Somebody else’s mind now looked out through Doberman’s eyes.
“More correct to say there are some people here on Earth who speak Indorsian,” replied Disin. He seemed pleased to take questions from the audience. “At some point long ago, a portal must have opened and a handful of Indorsians found their way back here. They brought with them an early version of the language you call English. And I have to say, you people have made an absolute hash of it. Whoever invented the word infomercial should be banished to Bogeyland. And don’t get me started on staycation.”
“Is Bogeyland a place in Indorsia?” Fiona asked.
“It’s a place in a Laurel and Hardy movie. Quite unpleasant. Even without the singing.”
We were walking with a madman. Alf was being held prisoner back at Underhill House. My friends and I were going to be enslaved through mind control. An invasion force from another world was about to take over our hometown, and from there, the world. Bogeyland couldn’t have been any worse. My palms were sweating and I was on the edge of panic. I had been crazy enough to call the madman stupid. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to have noticed.
We came up alongside the man we had once known as Coyote. He was standing at the balcony’s railing, studying the huge metal spiderweb that stretched across one end of the cavernous room. He was holding a remote-control box with a small steering wheel on it.
Coyote turned the little steering wheel an eighth of an inch to the left. The metal spiderweb groaned. A numeric display on the remote went from 7.6 to 8.1.
“That’s too tight!” snarled Disin, snatching the remote from Coyote and turning the wheel a half inch to the right. The display went from 8.1 to 6.2. The spiderweb sagged noticeably. “It’s crash netting. You want it to act like a fishing net, not a trampoline. The transport will be coming through with enough momentum for it to bounce. That must be kept to a minimum.” He handed the remote back to Coyote.
“Good help is so hard to find,” Disin confided. “Even when you have the capability of upgrading their brains.” He continued to lead us along the balcony. “Of the entire staff of the Disin Corporation, only nine people know what’s really going on here. Most know nothing, and the remainder think it’s some sort of project designed to stream TV commercials directly into people’s brains. Nobody seems to find that last part objectionable.”
“What did you promise the nine to get them to go along with this?” asked Freak.
“California.”
Two or three people in hard hats were down on the main floor, making adjustments to the washing machine–sized boxes at the base of the ice wall. Otherwise, I couldn’t see too many other people around. I was hoping that might somehow work in our favor.
On the opposite side of the cavern, high up on the wall, a clock was counting down minutes and seconds. It had gone from 45:18 to 41:22 in the time we had been on the balcony.
“What happens when the clock reaches zero?” Fiona asked quietly.
“The world changes,” said Disin. “I force open a portal that has been closed since 1952 and it stays open long enough for a troop transport to drop through. Then it closes again for at least another few years, until a sufficient number of neutrinos pass through the chargers and it can be opened again. In the meantime, the troops who arrived on the transport will have been quartered in the homes of the good people of Cheshire; adjacent communities will have been taken over; and, by this time next year, I rule the world.”
“Without opposition,” said Freak.
“Certainly not from anybody who uses a cell phone and consumes any of the tasty products of the Agra Nation® food company. The mind-control module will enable me to conquer your world in much less time than it took me to conquer Indorsia. The good news for you, however, is that my troops and I won’t be staying.”
“You won’t?”
“No. Why would I? Until I came here, I had no idea there was anything outside of Indorsia. I had claustrophobia and I didn’t know it. The first time I saw your sky at night, I thought it had holes in it. I thought the world was ending. I spent an embarrassing amount of time hiding under an ice-cream truck. When I finally understood that the holes in the sky were stars, with planets like Earth circling them, I felt such a sense of release. The day after I conquered Indorsia, I looked out on it all and I said, Is that all there is? Now I know there’s more, and I want it.”
“That’s probably just the Compulsive Completist Disorder talking,” I said.
In an instant, Disin had grabbed me by the collar, slammed me against the wall, and slid me halfway up it. Somewhere, his avatar was probably howling. Freak and Fiona both went for his back, but Jackal and Jervis caught them before they could help me.
“If it is the CCD,” said Disin, breathing cigar breath in my face, “there’s nothing I can do about it. None of Indorsia’s advanced medicine has been able to cure me. I would have been the owner of Earth years ago if I hadn’t been periodically compelled to drop everything I was doing and run off in pursuit of some idiotic comic book or baseball card or oddball crayon.” He looked down at my feet, which were dangling about a foot off the floor. “How tall are you?” he asked.
“F-four foot three and a half,” I stuttered, grateful for the change in topic but leery of the direction it was taking.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen in December.”
“Perfect.” He let me slide down the wall until I was back on my feet.
“You shouldn’t do that to a kid,” said Freak with an edge in his voice. I could tell he wanted to do something stupid. I was glad he had the sense not to.
Disin smoothed out the wrinkles he had made in my collar. To Jackal he said, “Have Setter come up here with a mnemocide bulb.” Jackal turned and spoke into a walkie-talkie. Freak and Fiona and I exchanged uneasy glances. Mnemocide wasn’t a word you easily forgot, even though it was the gas that destroyed all memory.
“No,” said Disin, as though I had never interrupted him, “I will not be staying. It will take a little over twenty-eight years for the enslaved population of Earth to build a fleet of space habitats big enough to transport the people of Indorsia out to new homes in the stars. At the end of those twenty-eight years, the slaves will wake up, wonder briefly why they are so tired and emaciated, and pick up their lives where they left off. Some will still be young enough to have children. Of course, Earth will look like an apple with enormous bites gone out of it, completely stripped of resources, but you were doing that to yourselves, anyway. It would only have taken you about a hundred years more to accomplish what I will do in twenty-eight. You can’t make an omelet without breaking coconuts.”
“Yes, you can,” said Fiona.
“Not if you’re making a coconut omelet
. And I love coconut omelets. Is that a cat?”
Disin scowled down at the cavern floor. We rushed to the railing in time to see a Mucus-colored streak dart in and out among the washing machines and disappear under the balcony.
“Nine lieutenants I’ve got,” muttered Disin, “all code-named after dogs, and they can’t keep a single cat out of the place. Pathetic.” He looked at us and spread his arms out, as if he were about to embrace us. “I am keeping the three of you alive, by the way—or at least two out of three—so that twenty-eight years from now you’ll be able to tell everybody I wasn’t a bad man. Just a driven one. Remember that, if you remember nothing else.”
“You’re not a bad man?” sputtered Freak. “How on earth can you think that?”
“Not being from Earth helps.”
“Did you say two out of three?” said Fiona.
“Is Indorsia dying?” I asked. “Is there a plague? Is the whole place overpopulated?”
“None of those things. Why do you ask?”
“There has to be some reason everybody will be leaving.”
“There is. I want them to. It’s my whim. Most members of the healthy, well-managed population of Indorsia don’t know they’re leaving yet. They’re contentedly tilling their fields and thatching their cottages and fletching their arrows and watching their 3-D TVs, happy with what little high-tech the Royals permit them to have, little suspecting that in less than thirty years, they’ll be on the adventure of a lifetime. And yes, it probably is the CCD. So you can blame Miranda. I find myself wanting everything that’s out there.” He waved his arm over his head, flipping his hand in the universe’s direction.