Brainboy and the Deathmaster Page 18

  “Where is Dare?” asked BJ, who’d been shining his flashlight from face to face.

  No one answered. Slowly, they all turned and stared up at the gloomily looming rock face—all except for Boris, who stood grinning at Nina. He gave her a conspiratorial nudge as he rolled up his sleeve.

  “Together again,” he whispered, tapping his NABATW tattoo. “Nina and Boris against the world.”

  44

  Nina felt as if her heart was being torn in two. After all these months she was finally reunited with her brother. Yet at the same time the boy who’d become a second brother to her was suddenly missing.

  As she stared up at the cave in the rock face, the broad-shouldered black boy came up to shake hands.

  “I’m BJ. A friend of Darryl’s.”

  “He talked about you,” she said. “You and your mother.”

  “Do you think he fell out of his egg or something?”

  “Could be,” Ruthie said, joining them. “It was a pretty rough ride.”

  “I’ll go check,” Nina said. “Boris and I can—Boris!”

  Boris had lit up a cigarette.

  “I don’t believe you!” Nina cried. “Mom dies of emphysema, and here you are, at it again!”

  Boris dropped the cigarette, shamefaced, and ground it under his shoe. Nina stooped down, pulled his pack out of his sock, crumpled it up, and shoved it in her pocket. “Come on,” she said.

  At the rock face Boris let her climb onto his shoulders. But even then she couldn’t reach the cave, and the surface of the rock below the opening was slick and slimy from the trickle of flushed chemicals.

  “Abs!” she cried.

  Dim though he might be, Abs didn’t need to be told what to do. Squatting down, he turned himself into a human stepladder. Boris, with Nina on his shoulders, climbed onto Abs’s thighs. Abs then grabbed Boris’s ankles, one by one, and placed his feet on his shoulders. Slowly, carefully, Abs raised himself out of his squat.

  “Good going!” BJ said as Nina pulled herself into the cave.

  “What’d you expect?” Boris said. “We’re the Flying Rizniaks.”

  “Could I borrow that, please, BJ?” Nina called down.

  BJ handed his flashlight to Abs, who handed it up to Boris, who tossed it up to Nina. Shining it into the cave, she saw that it was really a twisty drainage pipe. As she hiked up it, using a sort of side-to-side duck walk, the odor from the trickle of liquid between her feet grew more and more intense till it stung her nostrils like ammonia. When her hands started to sting, too, she wiped the slime off on the legs of her jumpsuit.

  At the end of the conduit a drop of liquid tapped her on the top of her head. She peered up forlornly at the bottom of the dripping mixing vat, shut tight as a drum.

  By the time she got back to the mouth of the cave, she was desperate for fresh air. Boris was still waiting on Abs’s shoulders, and she climbed down lickety-split.

  “No sign of him?” BJ said.

  She shook her head ominously as she handed back his flashlight. “He must be stuck in there with Mr. Masterly.”

  “Keith Masterly’s in there?”

  “Uh-huh. And now that he’s got what he wanted, he’ll take off and blow the whole place to kingdom come.”

  “What’s he got?” BJ asked as Greg Birtwissel, who’d regained consciousness while Nina was in the cave, started backing away from the cliff.

  “That’s a long story,” Nina said. “But take my word for it, we have to get Darryl out of there.”

  “How?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Maybe brainiac’ll think of something himself,” said Boris. “Where’s Masterly’s chopper?”

  “On the roof, Darryl told me,” said Nina.

  BJ swept the beam of light up the forbidding rock face.

  “Gosh, that’s a long way up,” Suki said.

  “What’ll happen if we’re standing down here when it blows?” Billy wondered aloud.

  They all exchanged anxious glances—except for Greg, who by then had backed halfway to the woods.

  45

  In his sixties Darryl’s grandfather had suffered from a condition that made him shake, especially his hands, but Darryl was shaking far worse than his grandfather ever had. He was at the fifth seam in the vent, and every muscle in his body was on fire, screaming: “Give up!” But even louder was the voice of his conscience yelling, “They’ll all suffocate!”

  Somewhere around the seventh seam his brain simply shut down, leaving only panting, aching, shaking, and clawing. His knees felt as if they’d been flayed, his wrists and ankles felt as if they’d been smashed with a sledgehammer. His throat was as dry as sand. But his instincts kept him from looking down, and a strength he never would have dreamed he possessed—perhaps he didn’t, perhaps it was somehow sent from his dead parents—kept him from letting go.

  Then everything went black.

  When he came to, his torso was collapsed on something flat and his legs were still dangling down the vent. He was gasping like a fish on a dock. Merely opening his eyes took a monumental effort. When he managed to, he saw a spider, a glistening black one, crouched in the middle of a web. The spider was six inches away and appeared poised to jump in his face, but Darryl didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. The web, glazed with moonlight, was stretched between the high side of a metal cone and the lab’s sandpapery roof. The cone seemed to have been meant to cover the vent like a hat, but it must have been blown or knocked off quite a while ago, for the web was as intricate as a MondoGameMaster maze.

  The spider evidently decided against jumping in his face, and after a couple of minutes Darryl mustered the strength to lift his head high enough to look over the cone. Parked about thirty yards away, half hidden under a camouflaged tarpaulin, was a helicopter as sleek and glistening-black as the spider. Next to it was what looked like a parking meter—though it was awfully hard to imagine anyone giving out tickets here.

  Managing to turn his head the other way, Darryl saw a legion of mountain peaks silhouetted against a subaqueous sunset. Poised above the watery western horizon was a waferlike moon that made him think of Nina. The last thing he felt like doing was moving, and the last place he wanted to go was the edge of the roof, but he had to find out if she and the others had made it out of the lab. He wormed forward till his legs were out of the vent. Once his feet were up on the roof, worming was a little easier.

  When his head poked out over the edge of the roof, his heartbeat doubled. But dizzying as the sheer, hundred-foot drop was, there was a fantastic payoff at the bottom. Not only had the pods gotten out of the lab, his friends had somehow gotten out of the pods! There they were, scurrying around down below in the moonlight.

  “Hello!” he yelled.

  Or at least tried to yell. His throat was too dry to produce more than a whisper. He swallowed a couple of times and managed to do better.

  A beam of light swept up the rock face and hit him full in the face, blinding him. An echoey chorus of familiar voices washed over him.

  “Darryl!”

  “Hey, kiddo!”

  “Dare, is that you?”

  The last voice electrified him.

  “BJ?” he cried.

  The light left his face. He blinked. Down below the person holding the flashlight turned it on his own face.

  “BJ!” Darryl cried, recognizing his friend instantly.

  “Hey, Dare!”

  “But … but what are you doing here?”

  “We came to find you! Me and Boris!”

  “Hey, brainboy!”

  Darryl was stupefied. By some miracle BJ and Boris had found the lab and been there to open the pods! He could see the glimmering pods strewn around a little stream. Farther on, he made out an orange tent remarkably like his parents’.

  “You climbed the vent?” Nina called up.

  “Yeah!”

  “Is there a chopper up there?” Boris yelled.

  Before he could answer, a
vibration ran through the roof, reminding him that there was still someone else in the lab.

  “Turn off the flashlight!” he yelled down. “Ditch the tent! Get in your pods!”

  They appeared to obey him. BJ and Boris quickly dragged the tent and their hiking gear into the woods while the others jumped into their movie pods. Squirming back from the edge, Darryl saw a razor-thin sliver of light slant up into the sky about halfway between him and the helicopter. The sliver turned into a beam, and a chilling apparition appeared in it: Mr. Masterly’s head. The upper body soon followed, then the complete, youthful man stepped up onto the roof, a suitcase in one hand, his battered briefcase in the other. Darryl wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr. Masterly had walked over and booted him over the edge, but as the shaft of light from below shrank and disappeared, Mr. Masterly turned the other way, toward the helicopter. He yanked off the tarp and tossed his bags into the cockpit. Before climbing in himself, he walked over to the parking meter in the eerie moonlight and seemed to feed it a coin.

  Still overheated from climbing the vent, Darryl actually appreciated the rush of cool air when the rotors started up. The spider didn’t: he curled into a tight ball in the center of his billowing web. On liftoff everything went black. The tarp, which Mr. Masterly hadn’t bothered to tie down, had blown over them.

  By the time Darryl writhed out from under it, the helicopter was hovering beyond the edge of the roof, a searchlight aimed straight down. Once Mr. Masterly had assured himself that the escapees were stuck in their pods, the helicopter zoomed off toward the dying light in the west.

  Darryl got up and limped, ankles throbbing, over to where the shaft of light had appeared. He had no more luck prying open the sliding roof panel over Mr. Masterly’s spiral staircase than he’d had with the elevator door.

  He started back toward the edge, then did an about-face and limped over to the parking meter. It wasn’t a parking meter. Instead of a slot for coins there was a keyhole, just like in the top elevator button. Above it was a digital readout—dark red numbers glowing like embers: 9:14, 9:13, 9:12.

  Darryl wasted only three seconds getting back to the edge. His lab mates were all climbing out of their pods, and BJ and Boris had emerged from the woods.

  “Get out of here!” Darryl screamed. “The whole place is going to blow in less than ten minutes!”

  A skinny figure already halfway to the woods quickly disappeared into them. But to Darryl’s horror the rest of them stayed put.

  “Get going!”

  At this BJ and Boris took off into the woods as well. But BJ soon returned, lugging a big coil of rope. Surely they weren’t going to try to scale the cliff! Not even Darryl’s parents could have climbed a rock face as steep as this one.

  “Don’t!”

  But it was a pathetic attempt at a yell.

  Boris soon came back out of the woods, too. He was carrying a branch, which he took a knife to, shaving off the bark. He quickly whittled it into a spear and gouged a hole in the thicker end like the eye of a needle. BJ stuck one end of the rope through the hole and tied it off and handed the spear to Abs. Abs backed up about ten yards and heaved the spear into the air.

  Strong as he was, the spear didn’t get halfway to Darryl before the weight of the uncoiling rope pulled it back down to earth.

  “Get out of here!”

  But now Darryl could barely even hear himself. Whether it was the strain of the chimney climb, or his vertigo, or the prospect of being blown up—his voice was gone.

  Boris went back into the woods and returned dragging the tent. While he gashed it, Nina untied the rope from the spear, then Boris tied something else to the spear while BJ tied something to the rope. Nina handed the spear to Abs, who backed up a few yards again and threw the spear straight up into the air.

  This time, to Darryl’s astonishment, it came right for him. In fact, he had to pull his head back to keep from being skewered. The spear reached its apex about twenty feet over his head, then clattered down onto the roof. It lay there for a moment, then rolled off the edge. Darryl poked his head back out in time to see it shatter against a rock down below.

  “You’ve got to grab it, Dare!” BJ cried.

  They ran to find a new branch and whittle another spear for Abs to throw. Again he managed to heave it onto the roof of the lab on his first try, and this time Darryl pounced on it. Tied through the hole was a piece of nylon thread: unraveled tent.

  “Pull it up!” BJ cried.

  Darryl pulled on the thread. It grew heavier and heavier, and eventually, instead of thread, he had rope.

  With the helicopter gone, the only place to secure the rope was the “parking meter.’’ He dashed over to it and knotted the end around it as the readout wound down: 4:33, 4:32, 4:31 …

  When he poked his head back out over the ledge, everyone down below started waving and hollering.

  “Come on, Dare!” cried BJ.

  “Hurry up, Darryl!” cried Nina.

  But as he peered down the length of rope, slithering like a hundred-foot python in the breeze, he knew it was useless. It was too far, and he’d used up all his strength on the chimney climb.

  “Get out of here! There’s only four minutes!”

  But his words came out as feeble croaks.

  He wormed back away from the edge and struggled to his feet. With his back to the precipice, he took the rope in his sweaty palms, his heart feeling like a bird about to burst out of its cage. He closed his eyes—and saw Nina, who would be buried in the rubble when the lab blew.

  Then Nina’s face became his father’s.

  “Come on, Dare,” he whispered. “You’re the only Kirby left.”

  Opening his eyes a slit, Darryl started backing toward the edge, feeding the rope out through his oily hands.

  46

  BJ’s hands were sweaty, too, as he steadied the end of the rope, as The Joys of Mountaineering instructed. Feeling the rope jerk, he looked up and saw a small, moonlit figure starting down the ten-story cliff.

  “He don’t look so hot,” Boris said.

  “How could he after that chimney climb?” said Nina.

  “After what?” Boris said.

  “What if the whole place blows?” said the Hispanic-looking boy.

  “Guess you better make a run for it, Mario,” Nina said.

  Mario looked over his shoulder, then back up at Darryl. He stayed put.

  Except for the one kid who’d already skedaddled, they all stayed put: three adults with scars on their fore-heads and eight kids standing there with their necks craned. They all gasped when Darryl lost his grip on the rope. But after a short fall he caught on the branch of a twisted pine growing out of the side of the cliff.

  “Careful!” Nina screamed.

  “You can do it!” BJ yelled, wishing he could take Darryl’s place up there.

  “Just don’t look down!” Nina advised.

  As Darryl continued his jerky descent, the rope slipped in his hands again. This time his foot caught on a little ledge.

  “Jeez,” Boris said. “He’s not going to make it.”

  “Come on,” BJ said, handing the rope off to Nina.

  To get a hundred feet of nylon thread they’d had to unravel only a small part of the tent. BJ told everyone to grab hold of the rest of it.

  “You know, like when somebody’s jumping off a building in a cartoon.”

  The group formed a circle with the tent stretched out in the middle like a trampoline. The skinny boy who’d taken off shouldered in beside BJ to take his place holding the net.

  “Greg!” Nina said. “You came back.”

  “Well, he got us out,” Greg said in a quavery voice.

  Darryl must not have taken Nina’s advice about not looking down. He must have seen what they were up to, for as soon as the net was tight as a drum, he pushed off the cliff and released the rope. Greg’s squeal was still echoing in the night air when Darryl landed on his back—“Oooomph!”—in the middle of the ten
t.

  He looked dazed, but as they lowered him to the ground, his eyes were open.

  “Are you okay, Dare?” BJ cried, kneeling beside him.

  Darryl blinked and said something, but too faintly to hear. BJ put his ear up to Darryl’s mouth. As soon as he made out the croaked message, he passed it on:

  “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Come on, everybody, let’s go!” Nina cried. “Abs, grab Darryl!”

  Abs tossed Darryl over his shoulder like a gunny-sack, and off they all went, abandoning the tent, rope, sack of provisions, knapsacks, and plastic eggs. Fortunately, BJ didn’t leave his flashlight. The notch bristled with fir trees that totally blocked out the moonlight. As they were clambering down the twisty trail, someone screeched, and BJ turned and shone his light on the Asian girl, who’d tripped on a root and was holding her ankle. The big man in kitchen whites picked her up and carried her over his shoulder, chortling as her long hair tickled his face.

  BJ had led them only a couple of hundred yards down the trail when someone kicked him in the small of his back with a heavy boot. At least that was how it felt as he dropped to his knees. A split second after the concussion came a deafening explosion, and the flashlight flew out of his hand. The sudden darkness rang with the splintering thunks. Groping, he located the flashlight under a fern and shone it around frantically. The first thing he stopped on was a grinning Abs, standing upright behind him on the trail, Darryl still over his shoulder. Behind him, the tall girl was sprawled on the ground, spluttering as she spat dirt off her lips.

  “Is anyone hurt?” came Nina’s voice from farther back.

  “My shoulder!” whined one boy.

  “My knee!” whined another.

  “My elbow!”

  It turned out that almost everyone had a bruise or a bump or an abrasion, but the soldierly firs had shielded them from the debris of the explosion. Not one of them was seriously injured. Still, they were all too shaken and weary to go much farther in the dark, so BJ and Boris led the way down to the meadow they’d passed on the hike up. It was a brisk night, but dry, and they all curled up together like a litter of puppies under the starry sky.