Read Mission Unstoppable Online
Authors: Dan Gutman
“I’m not gonna
kick
it down,” Coke told her. “I’m gonna use my shoulder.”
He backed up as far as he could go and sprinted for the door. At the last instant, he turned and leaped against the door. Then he crumpled to the floor.
“Did you dislocate your shoulder?” Pep asked, running to him.
“Shut up.”
Smoke was snaking under the door. The fire was in the hall. In the detention room, it was becoming hard to see. Worse, it was getting hard to breathe.
Coke was becoming enraged. Despite his sore shoulder, he got up and picked up a desk with both hands. Then he heaved it against the door. It clattered to the ground harmlessly after doing no more damage than nicking off a little paint.
Pep looked around frantically for something she could use to open the door.
“The fire extinguisher!” she yelled as she ran across the room and lifted it off a hook on the wall.
“We’ll die from smoke inhalation before the flames get to us!” Coke yelled at her. “The whole school could be burning down! You think you’re gonna put out the fire with a little fire extinguisher?”
“No!” she replied. “We can use it as a battering ram!”
Coke immediately understood what his sister had in mind as she held the fire extinguisher against the wooden door.
Newton’s first law of motion states that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. If they could put enough force against a single point on that door, they might be able to crash right through it. Coke picked up the desk again.
Despite everything that was happening, he couldn’t help but think how much fun it was to bust up stuff. Busting up stuff was one of the most fun things you could do.
Building
things is a long, slow, and difficult process. But busting up stuff was nothing but fun, as long as you didn’t have to clean up the mess afterward. He had often thought that the ideal career choice would be to work in the demolition business, blowing up old buildings and stadiums. The money probably wasn’t very good, but nothing beat the thrill of demolishing things.
Pep held the fire extinguisher against the door. Coke gave himself some running room and gripped the legs of the desk tightly.
“You ready?” he asked. “On three.”
“One . . . two . . . three!” they both hollered.
Coke took a deep breath and made a run for the door holding the desk in front him like a battering ram. Pep closed her eyes and tensed her muscles to absorb the impact. When the top surface of the desk crashed against the fire extinguisher, it hit a seam in the wood and broke through, cracking the door in half and sending two preteenagers, a school desk, a fire extinguisher, and pieces of splintered wood into the hallway.
But the hallway was engulfed in flames.
F
ire is an interesting thing. If you’ve ever passed your finger through a candle flame quickly, you know it doesn’t hurt. But leave that finger in the flame for one short second, and it’s a different story.
Did you ever look deeply into a flame? The white part is hotter than the yellow part, and the yellow part is hotter than the red part. But the hottest part of a flame is the blue part. That’s odd, because we think of blue as the color of cold and red as the color of heat.
You need three things to create fire: oxygen, heat, and fuel. Combine them, and you get ignition. Take any one of them away, and the fire goes out. The science of fire is pretty simple, really.
When the average kid comes crashing through a locked door and lands face-first in a hallway filled with smoke and flames, he probably isn’t going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about the science of fire. But Coke McDonald was not an average kid.
“Avoid the blue flames!” Coke shouted as he landed on top of his sister, who, in turn, had landed on top of the shattered door.
“Get off of me!” Pep shouted right back.
The twins jumped off the hot floor and were faced with a nightmare scenario. There were flames and thick smoke in all directions. The sprinkler system in the hallway ceiling had turned on, but the spray of water was no match for the inferno raging around them. Coke and Pep grabbed hold of each other instinctively. There was nothing else to hold on to that wasn’t on fire.
A lot of paper—toilet paper, paper towels, art supplies, napkins—was stored in the basement of the old school on the shelves next to the detention room. It had ignited fast. Tiny pieces of charred paper were swirling in the air around the frantic twins. But that wasn’t all that was burning. There was a noxious, flammable substance that had been poured all over the floor.
This fire had been set deliberately.
Who would want to burn down a school?
Don’t answer that question.
The sound of fire engines could be heard in the distance, but that didn’t provide Coke or Pep with any comfort now. The heat was intense. Their eyes were tearing from the smoke, their throats choking to breathe. There was a nasty chemical smell filling the hall. That stuff alone could probably kill you if you inhaled enough of it.
Pep tried to remember the lessons she’d learned when a firefighter came and spoke at the school a few years earlier. She recalled that he said something about “stop, drop, and roll,” but that wouldn’t help now. The
floor
was on fire. She wasn’t about to roll around on it.
Coke’s photographic memory had on file just about everything he’d ever experienced, but he had never bothered to notice where the basement fire exits were located. Even if he knew where they were, those doors could very possibly be locked, or intentionally blocked.
Coke pulled his T-shirt off over his head.
“What, are you trying to be macho?” Pep yelled.
“No, I’m trying to
live
!” he replied.
He ripped the shirt in half, wrapping one piece around his mouth and nose and handing the other piece to his sister. She made a mask of her own. As Coke looked up to see if the ceiling was about to collapse on him, he realized that the bottom of his left pants leg was on fire. He used his other foot to snuff it out, kicking himself and hurting his ankle in the process.
“Oww!”
he yelled.
“I think I smell carbon monoxide,” Pep shouted in his ear.
“Carbon monoxide is odorless, Einstein!” was his reply. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Which way?” she hollered. “I can’t see!”
“Doesn’t matter!” he shouted back. “You pick. You’re the one who has feelings. Use ’em!”
“It’s too hot!” she shouted.
Some burning debris fell off a shelf and almost hit her.
“We can’t stay here!” Coke told Pep. “We’ll be burned alive! One way or another, we’ve gotta make a run for it!”
“Right through the flames?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, “like you’re running your finger over a candle. If we move fast enough, we won’t feel a thing.”
“That’s crazy!” she said, and he knew she was right. But staying where they were would be crazy too.
“Where’s the fire extinguisher?” Coke yelled. “Maybe we can clear a path with it.”
They fumbled around on the floor until Pep got her hands on the fire extinguisher.
“Oww!”
she screamed. “It’s too hot to touch!”
Coke picked up a piece of the door they had broken and slapped at the flames with it. This worked to an extent, but the wood was heavy and quickly sapped his strength.
“We’re gonna die in here!” Pep screamed.
That’s when everything went dark.
A large cloth had landed on top of them, and they couldn’t see a thing. Then they felt hands pulling the edges of the cloth around them. It was damp.
They felt themselves being lifted and carried somewhere by somebody. They couldn’t get their arms free to struggle. They didn’t
want
to struggle. They wanted to get out of the hallway, and that was what was happening. Somebody had hoisted them up and was carrying them away.
The twins felt themselves being pushed through a set of double doors and then outside onto the grass in the playground behind the school. The blanket was pulled off so they could see their rescuer.
It was Mr. Rochford, the school janitor. Bones!
“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket,” he told them, “but I thought you kids could use one.”
Coke turned around to see the school enveloped in flames and firefighters in the distance spraying water on it.
“You speak . . . English?” Pep asked Bones.
“Of course,” he replied.
“We thought you were . . . retarded or something,” Coke explained.
“I believe the politically correct term is mentally challenged,” Bones said. “Listen, you kids need to get out of town right away. Somebody is trying to kill you!”
“Yeah, I think we kinda figured that out,” Coke said.
“Shouldn’t we try to save Mrs. Higgins?” Pep asked. “She might still be in the building somewhere.”
“That wouldn’t be a smart idea,” Bones told them.
“Why?”
“Because I think it might have been Mrs. Higgins who set the fire.”
A
s soon as they were safely away from the burning school, Bones pulled the twins out of sight, into the woods behind the playground. He tugged at his big bushy beard, and it came off in his hand. He pulled off his mustache. Then he reached under his shirt and tore away a thick piece of foam that had been wrapped around his stomach to make him look like an extremely fat man.
Bones was actually skinny!
“Guess I won’t be needing
this
stuff anymore,” he said, tossing his disguise aside.
Underneath it all, Bones looked pretty much like a regular guy. It was an amazing transformation.
“You mean to say you’ve been wearing a fat suit and pretending to be a mute the whole school year?” Pep asked him. “Why?”
“Because I knew this day would finally come,” Bones said. “It’s a long story.”
The fire department did its best to get the blaze under control, but it was hopeless. By the time the fire was completely extinguished, there wasn’t much left to save. It didn’t look like there was going to be school come September. Not at West Marin Middle School, anyway.
The police were relieved to find that there were no bodies in the rubble. No students or teachers had been in the building when the fire started. At least that’s what they told the news media. The detectives had no idea that the McDonald twins had been trapped inside the whole time. Mrs. Higgins, the health teacher, was long gone.
Coke and Pep McDonald had a lot of questions for Bones, the first one pretty obvious: “Why would our health teacher try to kill us?”
Bones was evasive. He told the twins he had been keeping an eye on Mrs. Higgins ever since they’d both been hired back in September. He suspected that she was up to something, but he didn’t know what she was going to do or when she was going to do it.
“Are you going to arrest her?” Pep asked.
“She’s probably just a paid assassin,” replied Bones. “I want to find out who’s doing the paying. And besides, I’m not a cop. I can’t arrest anybody.”
“Then who
are
you?” Coke demanded. “What’s going on? Why is all of this happening to us? We have the right to know. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah,” agreed Pep. “That’s the second time somebody tried to kill us in two days. And it wasn’t Mrs. Higgins the first time. The first time it was some dudes wearing black suits and bowler hats.”
“Come with me,” Bones told the twins. “I’ll tell you as much as I’m allowed.”
They walked around the corner to Bones’s car, an old Ford with a nice variety of dents on the front and back fenders. The guy was either a lousy driver or . . . no, he was just a lousy driver. With some reluctance, Coke and Pep got into the backseat. Individually, neither one of them would have set foot inside that car. Together, they felt safer. If Bones tried anything funny, at least they had him outnumbered.
Bones drove about a mile to a strip mall the twins had been to many times because their favorite Chinese restaurant was there. He pulled the car around to the back where there were some Dumpsters and wooden pallets leaning against the wall. Bones stopped at an unmarked garage door and got out of the car.
“What is this, your supersecret spy headquarters?” Coke asked.
“You might say that,” he replied.
Pep took Coke’s hand so they couldn’t be separated. Bones wasn’t a complete stranger, but all the same she felt uneasy following him around. For all she knew, maybe it was
Bones
who was actually trying to kill them. Maybe this was all an elaborate trap, and they were walking right into it.
Coke had no such concerns.
“Do you have cool doors that slide open and go
whoosh
, like in spy movies?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” Bones replied.
He reached down and yanked on the old garage door until it opened with a wrenching squeak.
“You oughta oil that thing,” Coke said as he walked inside the garage and looked around.
“Hurry!” Bones urged Pep. “Whoever is trying to kill you may be following us. They may try to burn down the place, just like they burned down the school.”
“All right,” Pep demanded. “What’s going on? We want some answers.”
“Okay. Do the letters
T G F
mean anything to you?” Bones asked after Pep had stepped inside. He pulled down the door behind her.
“No clue.”
“
T G F
!” Coke exclaimed. “Yeah! That was the last thing that lady Mya said to us before we jumped off the cliff!”
“That’s right!” Pep said. “And then she got hit by a dart and collapsed.”
“
T G F
stands for The Genius Files,” Bones began. “It’s a top secret government program. I work for TGF. Mya is one of us. Or
was
, I should say, before they got to her. Mrs. Higgins used to be with TGF too. Now, it appears, she has a different agenda. She must be working for somebody else.”
Bones told the McDonald twins all about Dr. Herman Warsaw and what had happened to him on 9/11. How he’d stepped outside for a cigarette; and as the plane crashed into the Pentagon, he’d come up with the idea of enlisting the smartest kids in the country to solve the world’s problems. But somewhere along the way, that genius plan seemed to have gone off the tracks.
“And you two are a part of TGF too,” Bones explained.
Ordinarily, Coke would have let out a snort and said, “You gotta be kidding me.” In his almost thirteen years, nothing particularly amazing had ever happened to him or his sister. They led completely normal lives filled with video games, pizza, TV, and all the normal things that kids in the suburbs are used to. The idea that they were actually part of a vast government program was inconceivable. But there had been two attempts on their lives now, and it was starting to sink into Coke’s brain that he and his sister were in the middle of something big. Their days as normal kids were over.
“Why were
we
chosen for TGF?” Pep asked. “We’re not that smart.”
“Speak for yourself,” Coke told her.
“You are
extremely
smart,” Bones told her. “But I will tell you that when Dr. Warsaw started the program, he wanted to have a few children who could work as a team, and enlisting twins seemed to be a good way to accomplish that. He may have lowered his baseline score a few points in order to include both of you.”
“But why would Mrs. Higgins try to kill us?” Pep asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Bones replied. “Maybe she had a falling out with Dr. Warsaw, and she’s trying to get back at him.”
“Our parents are going to go
ballistic
when they find out about all this,” Pep said, shaking her head.
“No they won’t,” Bones said, his voice lowering slightly. “You can’t tell them.
Ever
.”
Bones explained to the twins that it was Dr. Warsaw’s belief, logically enough, that parents would never allow their children to be part of such a dangerous program. It was also Dr. Warsaw’s belief that The Genius Files was so crucial to the security of the United States that parents of the young geniuses must never be informed. The children had to be sworn to secrecy, with the implied threat to their loved ones if word ever got out. And they were strictly forbidden to notify the police or other authority figures about any TGF activities.
“Wait a minute,” Pep said. “We never agreed to be part of this Genius Files thing. You can’t force us.”
“You’re already in it,” Bones replied simply. “It was all about standardized test scores. Your names are in the computer. Didn’t your parents receive a letter saying you would be in a special gifted and talented program? It went out months ago.”
“They probably threw it away,” Coke said. “Our parents are kind of spacey.”
“If the letter went out months ago, why did you wait until now to contact us?” Pep asked.
“I wanted to wait until we had a mission for you,” Bones told her. “Now, of course, you have a temporary mission: to stay alive.”
“Let me get this straight,” Coke said. “It doesn’t matter if we agreed to be part of this Genius Files thing or not. Either way, Mrs. Higgins and those bowler dudes are trying to kill us.”
“That’s unfortunate, and true,” Bones said. “I’m sorry you were put in this position. It was out of my control. But I hope you
will
agree to help us.”
“What do we have to do?” Pep asked.
“I can’t tell you right now, for security reasons,” Bones replied. “Some things are better off not being known. You’ll be contacted in due time.”
“That’s
it
?” Coke said with some anger in his voice. “That’s all you’re gonna tell us? And you expect us to help with your screwball program? This is bogus. What’s in it for us?”
“A million dollars when you turn twenty-one. . . .”
“A million dollars?” Pep asked.
“Each,” added Bones. “Tax free. Not to mention excitement, travel . . .”
“Travel?” Coke said. “Oh, great. So people will be trying to kill us all over the world? We’ll never live to be twenty-one.”
“. . . and protection,” Bones added. “I might mention that we already saved your lives twice.”
“That’s only because you put us in the position of our lives being threatened!” Coke said. “You almost got us
killed
twice!”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Okay, so when do we get to meet this famous Dr. Warsaw?” Pep asked.
“Probably never,” Bones told her. “I’ve only met him once myself: the day he hired me. He’s a brilliant man, and also a recluse. I hear he lives on a boat somewhere.”
“Great,” Coke muttered.
“Are there others out there?” Pep asked. “Other TGF kids like us?”
“Yes,” Bones said. “Lots of others. Maybe you’ll get to meet them.”
“I don’t want to meet them,” Pep said. “I just want things to go back to normal.”
“You can forget about that,” Coke grumbled.
“Look,” Bones told the twins, “sometimes people do things for money, or fame, or because their parents tell them to. Other times they do things to look cool or for some superficial, cosmetic reason. And sometimes people want to do something for the good of their country or the good of the world. People have all kinds of motivations for doing what they do. Whatever you decide, I’ll respect your decision. No hard feelings either way. If you decide not to help us, you’ll never hear from me again. I’m not saying Mrs. Higgins and those men in bowler hats who have been after you are going to stop, but I promise you won’t hear from me again. Of course, if you’re in trouble and need help, you won’t hear from me either.”
“How long do we have to decide?” Coke asked.
“Five minutes.”
The twins went off to the corner of the garage to talk things over. The easy solution, they agreed, would be to walk away. Just say no. Common sense said to pretend the whole thing never happened. Go back to their normal lives.
But both of them realized that there was no normal life anymore to be had. Somebody was out to get them, and not just their crazy health teacher, Mrs. Higgins. For all they knew, they would step out of the garage to find a group of assassins aiming machine guns at them. It’s not like these people were going to leave them alone just because they said they weren’t playing the game anymore.
And, of course, a million dollars was a million dollars.
Being the younger of the two (by three minutes), Pep would generally defer to her brother when it came to tough decisions. She said she was torn and would leave the final decision up to him.
Coke had a crazy, delusional thought running through his head. There was one thing he didn’t get a lot of in his ordinary suburban life. There was one thing that
every
kid wants more of. It wasn’t money, or straight As, or a cool ringtone. It was attention.
“When this thing is over,” he said to himself, “we might be on every talk show and every magazine cover. There will be fan clubs and websites devoted to us. The girls will be crazy for me. I’ll be signing autographs for my adoring fans. When this is all over, I’ll be so famous that I might have to wear a disguise in public so people won’t mob me. I’ll be like a rock star.”
That is, if he was still alive. It would be a gamble.
After five minutes, Bones asked for an answer using a one-word question.
“So?”
Coke took a deep breath.
“We’re in,” he replied.