Authors: Dan Gutman

Mission Unstoppable (15 page)

Mrs. Higgins went back to the trunk again and took out a smaller container with a lid on it. She removed the lid and went to the front of the car. Her body was blocking their line of sight, so the twins couldn’t tell if it was a liquid, a powder, or what it was that she was pouring into the larger container that was strapped to the front bumper. But she was leaning over the container, definitely pouring something into it.

“I think it’s some kind of bomb!” Pep whispered.

“She’s gonna drive it into the ball of twine and blow it up!” Coke whispered.

“Why would she do a crazy thing like that?”

“Maybe she’s a suicide bomber!”

“But why would a suicide bomber bother blowing up a ball of twine?” Pep asked.

“Don’t you see?” Coke told his sister. “The largest ball of twine is a symbol of America, just like the Liberty Bell or the White House. No other country in the world would produce a dreamer who spends thirty years of his life rolling a giant ball of twine. It’s symbolic of the American spirit: hard work, determination, creativity, freedom, and all that stuff.”

“If she was going to destroy a symbol of America,” Pep asked, “why wouldn’t she drive a car into the Liberty Bell or the White House?”

“Because she
can’t
!” Coke told his sister. “They’ve got armed guards there 24/7. If she made one false move toward the Liberty Bell, the security people would take her down in a second.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Pep whispered. “There’s no security around here. It probably never even occurred to the police that somebody would try to harm the ball of twine. It’s the perfect target!”

Mrs. Higgins put the cap on the container that was strapped to the front bumper of her convertible. She got back into the car and lit a cigarette. It looked as if her hands were shaking.

“She’s preparing mentally,” Coke whispered. “She’s working up the nerve. Then she’s gonna ram the car into the ball of twine and blow it to kingdom come. She’ll be dead, but she will have struck a blow against America. And the attack will be on the evening news all over the world tomorrow.”

“We need to call the cops,” Pep said, taking out her cell phone.

“No time for that,” Coke told her. “We gotta do something, and fast.”

“What are we gonna do?” Pep asked, looking in the backpack. “Throw a Frisbee at her? Attack her with a yo-yo?”

Mrs. Higgins flicked an ash from her cigarette out of the convertible. Coke thought it over. And then he brightened.

“I got it,” he finally said.

“Got what?”

“Shhhhh! Follow me.”

Coke got out and tiptoed over to the side of the RV. He opened a panel on the side, took out a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and put them on.

“What are you doing?” Pep whispered.

“It’s time to do a dump,” Coke replied as he uncurled the thick hose and attached it to the connectors under the RV.

“Wait a minute,” his sister said. “You mean to say you’re going to drop the contents of our toilet on Mrs. Higgins?”

Coke just grinned and nodded his head.

“That’s disgusting!” she said.

“I know!” he replied. “That’s why I’m doing it. She’s in for a big surprise.”

Coke gave the connector one last turn until the hose clicked into place. Then he took the other end of the hose and pulled it toward the guardrail. It reached just long enough to hang over the ledge and dangle above the convertible.

Down below, Mrs. Higgins took one last puff of her cigarette and flicked it away. Then she took some hand sanitizer out of the glove compartment and wiped off the steering wheel. Finally, she pulled the gloves back on.

“She’s getting ready to leave!” Pep said. “She’s putting her seat belt on!”

“Perfect!” Coke said. “That will make it harder for her to get out of the car. Quick! Go pull the lever next to the hose.”

At the same moment that Mrs. Higgins reached for her key to start her car, Pep pulled the lever next to the hose.

And that’s when five days’ worth of human waste slid down out of the holding tank, through the hose, and dropped into the driver’s seat of the red convertible parked directly below.

If you sat down and made a list of the most disgusting things that could possibly happen to a human being, having almost a week’s worth of human waste—both liquid and solid—fall on your head would probably be right up there at the top.

Mrs. Higgins let out a momentary shriek when the first few ounces hit her head but then wisely decided to close her mouth. She tried to unhook her seat belt, but by that time everything was wet and slippery.

The hose was thick, maybe five inches in diameter. It didn’t take long for the front seat of the convertible to be covered. Mrs. Higgins thrashed around helplessly, like a fish on the floor of a rowboat.

“Let’s blow this pop stand!” Coke said gleefully.

The twins scrambled to detach the hose from the connector and put it back in place. They took one last look over the railing to see Mrs. Higgins still sitting there, helpless and weeping, in a pool of human waste up to her neck. The twins jumped back into the RV. Coke started it, jammed it into reverse, and peeled out of there.

As they drove back into town, Coke and Pep were screaming and hooting and high-fiving each other as if they had just won the Super Bowl.

“It’ll take her a long time to clean
that
off!” Coke hollered.

“She won’t be driving that car into
anything
for a while,” Pep yelled.

“You know what they say,” Coke told his sister. “When all you’ve got are lemons, make lemonade.”

“And those weren’t lemons!” his sister shrieked.

They drove back to the center of Darwin, laughing all the way. Luckily, the parking space where the RV had been was still open. Not so luckily, there were two people standing in it.

Their parents.

“You two are
so
grounded!” Mrs. McDonald hollered.

Chapter 20
Grounded

T
he twins had done a lot of foolish things in their lives to make their parents angry. There was the time they jumped off a trampoline with umbrellas. The time they dialed 911 to see how long it would take for the cops to show up. The time they thought it would be fun to roll down the hill near the mall in shopping carts. Coke wound up in the emergency room after that one.

But they had never done anything as foolish, dangerous, and yes, let’s say it—stupid—as going on a joyride in a recreational vehicle.

“Are you kids out of your
minds
?” Mrs. McDonald shouted when Coke pulled the RV back into the parking spot. “Do you have one brain between the two of you? What were you thinking? We could all be in jail right now! You said you were going to look for souvenirs! Where were you? We thought the RV had been stolen!”

Veins were sticking out of Mrs. McDonald’s neck. People were starting to stare. It was causing a scene on the street.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Dr. McDonald assured the gathering crowd. “This isn’t child abuse, folks. My kids just went out for a little ride . . .
in our rented RV
! They turn thirteen years old the day after tomorrow. I guess they think they’re old enough to drive now.”

“Can’t blame you for screaming at ’em, pal,” a guy walking by said. “If they were my kids, I’d ship ’em off to military school.”

“We’re really sorry, Dad,” Pep said sincerely as she scampered into the backseat where she belonged. “We’ll never do it again.”

“Why did you do it
this
time?” asked her mother. “Do you have an explanation? I’d like to hear it.”

Pep looked at her brother, who was slinking out of the driver’s seat.

“Uh, we went to do a dump,” Coke said. It was the truth, technically.

“You went to do a
dump
!?” Dr. McDonald was incredulous.

“That was the job you gave me,” Coke reminded him. “The holding tank was really full, Dad. I promised I would do a dump today, and I felt bad that I forgot to do it yesterday. I always keep my promises, y’know.”

Dr. McDonald was too upset to speak. He slapped his forehead and walked around in a circle on the sidewalk trying to regain his composure.

“Who said you could drive?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

“You’re always telling us that we should take the initiative,” Coke said lamely.

“You’re
minors
!” Dr. McDonald said, exploding. “It’s against the law for you to drive a motor vehicle! You could have been arrested! Mom and I could have been arrested! The police would say we’re neglecting our kids! Did you ever think of
that
?”

“Calm down, Dad,” Coke said. “You’ll give yourself a coronary. Everything’s fine. We did the dump. The RV doesn’t have a scratch on it, and nobody got hurt. So what’s the big deal?”

Dr. McDonald climbed into the driver’s seat mumbling “It’s a
rental
!” and how this sort of thing never happened when
he
was a kid. He drove out of Darwin aggressively, stomping on the gas pedal at every green light and stomping on the brake when the lights turned red. It was the only way he could express his anger.

They drove in silence for several miles until Coke worked up the courage to speak.

“May I ask one question, Dad?”

“What is it?” Dr. McDonald said sharply.

“When we’re at home and you ground us, we have to stay in the house. I understand that. But how do you ground us when we’re in an RV?”

Pep rolled her eyes. Sometimes, she wished, her brother should just keep his mouth shut.

“I’ll tell you how,” Dr. McDonald replied. “Your mother and I are going out to a nice dinner and a movie tonight . . .
alone
. You two are going to stay at the campground and think about what you did.”

“Fair enough,” Coke said sheepishly.

I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed at an RV campground. Some of them are fully equipped with game rooms, stores, Ping-Pong tables, swimming pools, basketball courts, WiFi, and videos. Others just have an electrical hookup for your RV, a septic tank (so you can do a dump), and pretty much nothing else.

Mrs. McDonald purposely found a campground for the night that had
no
amenities. The place was basically a big parking lot with an office. After he checked in, Dr. McDonald told the twins to get out of the RV.

“We’ll be at the movies,” he said. “See if you can make it through the next few hours without getting into trouble.”

With that, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald drove away.

“What do you wanna do?” Pep asked.

“I don’t know. What do
you
wanna do?” her brother replied.

“I asked you first.”

There wasn’t a whole lot to do. The twins put their backpacks on the nearest picnic table. Coke took out the Frisbee and flipped it casually to his sister. Then he ran about ten yards out into the parking lot.

“Do you think what we did was wrong?” Pep asked as she flipped the Frisbee back to him.

“Mrs. Higgins tried to kill us!” Coke said. “All we did was do a dump on her head.”

“No,” Pep said, catching his return throw. “I mean, was it wrong to drive the RV?”

“Oh,” Coke replied. “Well, yeah,
that
was wrong. But it was right to do the dump on Mrs. Higgins’s head, because it prevented her from blowing up the ball of twine. And how could we do the dump on her head and prevent her from blowing up the ball of twine if we didn’t drive the RV? The right we did compensated for the wrong we did. So, all in all, I say we did the right thing.”

Pep couldn’t argue with his logic.

“It was fun, wasn’t it?” Coke asked. “Doing the dump, I mean.”

“Yeah.” She giggled.

They threw the Frisbee back and forth a number of times, and Coke had to admit that his sister was getting better. She had learned to hold the Frisbee level as she released it. She didn’t throw it very hard, but she was throwing it accurately. He hardly ever had to go chase it down.

When they got tired of playing Frisbee, they opened their backpacks looking for something else to do. Pez dispensers, yo-yos, balls of twine, and the deck of cards were scattered across the picnic table. Pep pulled out her pad and suddenly remembered the most recent cipher they had received. In all the excitement, she had completely forgotten about it.

Together they sat down at the picnic table and examined the cipher closely.

“The numbers in the first row are all higher than the numbers in the second row,” Coke said.

“Brilliant, Einstein,” his sister replied. “Did you notice that the numbers in the bottom row are all
1
,
2
, or
3
, except for a single
4
?”

“The numbers must correspond to letters in some way,” Coke said. “It can’t be as simple as
1
means
A
,
2
means
B
, and so on, because the bottom row would be almost all the same three letters.”

“I can see some patterns,” Pep pointed out. “In the top row,
8 4 3
is repeated three times. And in the bottom row,
1 2 2
is repeated three times. And look, the repeating digits are in the same place—on top of each other. That’s got to mean something.”

“The top and bottom rows are related to each other in some way,” Coke guessed. “Maybe the code is
6 3
,
6 2
,
3 2
, and so on.”

At that point, Coke’s cell phone beeped. A text had come in from his father.

U KIDS OK? WERE SORRY WE GOT SO MAD

Coke texted back

no prob.

“Hey!” Pep said suddenly. “Let me see your phone for a sec.”

“Why?”

“Just let me see it.”

He handed his sister the cell, and she peered at the keypad. Slowly, her eyes widened and a smile spread across her face.

“Look!” she said excitedly. “There are no
1
s on the top line of the cipher!”

“So?”

“Just like the number
1
on the telephone keypad has no letters that go with it!”

“I don’t read you,” Coke said, confused.

“Don’t you see?” Pep said. “Number
2
on the telephone keypad represents the letters
A
,
B
, and
C
. Number
3
represents
D
,
E
, and
F
. Number
4
represents
G
,
H
, and
I
. And so on. Each number on the keypad stands for three letters.”

“But that doesn’t help us,” Coke said, “because every number in the cipher can be any of three different letters.”

“That’s right. It’s the
bottom
row that tells us which letter it is!” Pep said excitedly. “See? The first column of numbers is
6
and
3
. The
6
on the keypad represents the letters
M
,
N
, and
O
. And the
3
tells us it’s the
third
letter. So the message begins with the letter
O
!”

“Well, if
6
and
3
equals the letter
O
,” Coke said, “then the next letter in the message is represented by
6
and
2
. And that would be . . .”

They looked at the keypad and said it together: “
N
.”

The next number was a
3
, with a
2
underneath it. They looked at the keypad and saw that the
3
could be
D
,
E
, or
F
; and the
2
meant it was the second of those, the letter
E
.

“
O-N-E
,” Pep said as she wrote it down on her pad. “That’s probably the first word of the message!”

The twins quickly figured out that every time there was a
6
on the top row and a
3
beneath it, that represented the letter
O
. And every time there was a
4
on the top row and a
3
beneath it, that represented the letter
I
. Every time there was an
8
on the top row and a
1
beneath it, that represented the letter
T
. They rushed to fill in the rest of the letters.