Read The Hole in the Wall Online
Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino
Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters
The Hole in the Wall (22 page)
“But—how can ORC get away with that?” I said. “Three guys dead? There wasn’t anything on the news. Grum would have been gabbing our ears off about something like that.”
Jed checked outside the curtain again. He was getting really nervous, I could tell by the twitching around his eyes. In a low voice I could barely hear, he said, “Look, half the people who work here never go anywhere. Nobody even knows they’re here. It’s as if they don’t exist.”
Barbie was pacing in arcs around Pa’s bed, biting off her beloved fingernails. “Jed, I know you don’t want Boots Odum to find out about our adrium vein, but this is a matter of life and death! We should tell him about how Sebby lost his dough so he can help us save Pa! And all those poor animals . . .”
“No way!” I waved my hands across her face. “We can tell him how I lost my raisins instead. On his property.”
She hit her hand on her head, looking a lot like me for once. Except for the hair. “I knew that,” she said. “That’s a way better idea.” She patted my arm admiringly, for the first time ever. My face got warm and probably had a silly smile on it.
Jed looked as confused as his explanation had made me. “Raisins . . . huh? What’s this idea?”
“There’s another place where the miracle cure happens,” I told him. “The Hole in the Wall, where you rescued us tonight. That’s why we went there in the first place, to save Ma’s chickens.”
“The paint flew out of Sebby’s back there, too,” Barbie added excitedly.
“Paint out of Sebby’s back . . . ? Oh, never mind. Tell me later. There’s no time to waste. We’re not waiting for Stan.” And Jed started yanking Pa’s cords and tubes out of the wall. This was a job I could get into. I leaped to his aid.
“What about Ma?” Barbie said, looking out the curtain toward the scanning room door. “We can’t leave without her.”
Jed said, “Yes, we can. When Ma comes out here, so will Dr. Mills, and Dr. Mills works for Stan. She is not going to let us take Pa out of here without security clearance. There’s no time for that. If we want to save Pa, we’re going to have to leave Ma to take care of herself. Let’s go!”
“I’m not leaving Ma.” Barbie crossed her arms.
“Suit yourself,” Jed said, and gestured for me to help him roll Pa’s bed.
We were almost at the door when a buzzer started ringing from somewhere that sounded like everywhere. A red light blinked overhead, and a voice came over the intercom, “Security Protocol Aegis Shield in effect. Repeat, Security Protocol Aegis Shield.” Man, oh man, was I scared.
The door to the scanning room flew open, and Dr. Mills ran out with Ma close behind, looking confused. They practically fell into Pa’s lap.
“Craig!” cried Ma in a voice that no words could describe. She looked like the shock would have exploded her head if she wasn’t holding her face together with her hands.
“Busted,” I said, thinking this would be the end of life as I knew it. No more homework, no more church, no more of Ma’s hockey puckburgers—we were all going to disappear in the guts of ORC forever and ever. But Dr. Mills surprised me.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re here to help, Jed. Get your father and the rest of your family out, and I’ll take care of Miss Beverly. Go straight to the Boys of Summer Stadium, and report to Zone Q.”
“Miss Beverly?” me and Barbie both said as Dr. Mills threw open a door next to her own room. Sure enough, the long-necked Miss Beverly was sitting up in bed looking confused.
Jed called, “I’m on top of it, doc,” and flashed me and Barbie a crooked grin as he held his hand out to Ma. “Come with us, Ma.”
“Hey, shouldn’t someone rescue the Dogstars, too?” I asked, feeling pretty proud of myself for figuring it out. “They must be somewhere behind a curtain back here. Right?”
“Huh?” said Jed. “Who?”
“The hippies at Zensyl—”
“Hurry!” cried Dr. Mills.
At that, our family skating skills came in handy as we raced Pa’s roller bed up the long hallway, dodging the people who were popping out of doorways and archways. Everyone ran as if their lives depended on it. It was dizzy-making chaos, the scariest two minutes of my life. Which was saying a lot, considering the minutes I’d been having lately. I had to hold on hard to my corner of the bed and run along with the tide of people mostly in pajamas as the buzzers and lights blared and the loudspeaker kept repeating the same message over and over, Security Protocol Aegis Shield, Security Protocol Aegis Shield. That meant to evacuate immediately, Jed shouted when Ma asked. It felt like one of those movies where everyone has to jettison out in the pods before the spaceship self-destructs.
The elevators and the door to the parking ramp were bottlenecked with people waiting to get out with suitcases on wheels, files on hand trucks, and carts loaded with equipment. Someone had jammed a nutty candy bar under the door to keep it propped open, and the security alarm was going crazy. My stomach growled. I eyed the candy bar and started to bend over for it, but Jed yanked me back to attention.
As soon as we squeezed through, Jed called, “To Pa’s truck!”
We pushed the bed up the ramp, veering around cars and trucks squealing out of their spots. It seemed that the compound went on for acres, maybe even a mile, underneath the ground. The place was like an iceberg, and the Onion top was only the tip of it.
After an eternity we got to the truck and loaded Pa into the back, leaving the hospital bed in the next empty space. Nobody even made any jokes about how ridiculous he looked in his hospital johnny, like we would have if we weren’t all in a terrified panic. Ma climbed in back with me and Pa while Barbie jumped into the front with Jed. He fished the keys out of his pocket, honked the horn, and butted out into the line of traffic. He kept honking and scooting around other cars that were backing out, forcing the truck’s way up and out of the Onion.
At the exit a security goon waved traffic along toward town, but instead Jed veered toward our side of the gore. “This isn’t the way to the stadium!” Ma cried. “The doctor told us to meet her at Zone Q! What does your brother think he’s doing?”
“Saving Pa’s life,” I said, holding on tight to the side of the truck. We were bumping along Odum’s Gash like bobsled racers. Jed leaned intently over the steering wheel. Driving couldn’t have been easy for him with his stiff leg braces. Every few seconds he checked the rearview mirror. I kept looking all around, watching for goons, but nobody was following us.
“Seb, it’s time you told me what’s been going on,” Ma said sternly. And so I told her. Just about everything. Well, maybe not everything. But enough to satisfy her, while not getting me grounded in the next life. Until the truck bounced to a stop at the Hole in the Wall.
The oasis looked different now. So much for the bright, moonlit sky. Clouds had covered our world again. The dark outlines of living trees stuck out of the mudslide. No longer did the trees dangle upside down from the cliff above. They had slid down to the ground and been buried, mostly, with a few roots sticking out here and there like creepy zombie hands in a cemetery.
Jed left the headlights shining into the cave and hopped out to open the tailgate. “We have to hurry. If the adrium containment shield blows, it’ll take the whole gore with it.”
We each took an arm or a leg, all four of us—Ma, Barbie, Jed, me—and carried Pa inside. Talk about heavy as a rock! Jed said Pa probably wasn’t much heavier than normal, though. “He just feels that way because he’s deadweight.”
“Ooh, deadweight,” said Ma. “I think that adrium stuff twisted your sense of humor.”
“I take offense at that, Ma,” said Jed. “My sense of humor has always been twisted.”
The chickens clucked and gathered around, expecting hand-outs of grain, but all they got was Pa plunked down with a THUD. “Here you go, ladies,” I said, rubbing my hands and making Ma laugh nervously as she adjusted Pa’s johnny to cover his sprawled legs.
“I still can’t believe what you told me on the way over here, Seb,” she said. “Colors flying out of chickens into rock walls. It sounds like some fantasy out of a children’s book!”
“How long does this take, anyway?” Jed said, looking warily down at Pa.
“The chickens only took a few minutes,” I said. “Do you feel anything?”
Jed looked down at his legs and smirked. “You know, I didn’t even think of that!”
“You could see if anything’s happening if you had the magic glasses on,” Barbie said.
“Dang!” I said, feeling my pockets. “I lost them.”
“They must still be here somewhere,” Barbie said. Both of us got on our knees and felt around in the blankets where we had gone to sleep just a few hours ago.
“So that’s where Grum’s quilt went,” said Ma.
“Aha, here we go.” I found the glasses and handed them to Ma.
She put them on and made the predictable noises. “Incredible. The stone is alive.” Then she stared intently at Pa. I couldn’t tell whether she was hoping he’d come back to life, or hoping he wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure what I thought about that myself. And then I felt bad for not being sure. You shouldn’t want your father to die, should you? But I couldn’t help but think it would solve a lot of problems. Then he wouldn’t have to decide to stay or go, to change or not change. We wouldn’t have to be scared of his temper anymore.
“Do you see any colors swirling out of him, Ma?” Barbie asked. Ma shook her head no and handed Jed the glasses. He gaped all around at the cave walls and tipped his head back to examine the ceiling. “Wow, this place is gorgeous. No wonder Stan couldn’t bear to mine his childhood getaway.”
“Huh?” I said. “What do you mean,
his
childhood getaway?! I mean, I know he owns the property, technically, but . . . but . . . ,” I sputtered. Everyone was giving me strange looks.
his
childhood getaway?! I mean, I know he owns the property, technically, but . . . but . . . ,” I sputtered. Everyone was giving me strange looks.
“Seb, this cave belonged to Stan before you were even a glint in Pa’s eye,” Jed said. “If not for this cave, Grum would probably still be living in the gore and Stan Odum would probably be a starving artist next door. He used to hang out here as a kid. The walls would sometimes seem to blink colors at him, and he became a scientist just to figure out the cause. That’s why he started ORC. He believes that the power of adrium could fuel distant space travel, if it can be controlled. There are exciting possibilities for adrium as a clean source of energy. At the very least it would have many uses in industry, medicine, defense, you name it. Anyway, this was Stan’s secret place first.”
“Oh,” I said.
Jed started pacing around, jostling elbows with everyone in the small area of the cave. He hit his head on the ceiling and rubbed it. “Shoot! Shouldn’t something have happened to Pa now?”
“He’s not a chicken,” I said.
“That’s for sure,” Jed said. “He’ll fight with anyone.”
But for once I wasn’t joking. “That’s not what I mean! The adrium flew out of the chickens quickly, but it didn’t leave my back right away. I don’t really even know when it happened.”
“Sometime after I scratched your back,” Barbie said. “Remember how itchy it was?”
Jed nodded along with me. “Itching is one of the early symptoms of adrification. My legs itched so much when I first woke up, I used to reach down my casts with chopsticks to scratch. When Dr. Mills caught me, she took away my chopsticks and gave me a turkey baster to squirt air instead. After the casts came off she gave me heating pads. That really made the stiffness and pain feel better.”
“Hey, Shish, it’s been a long night. How about another back rub?” I said, throwing myself stomach down on the blankets. She kicked me instead.
“Back rub? You mean you didn’t just scratch—you massaged?” Jed asked.
Barbie nodded. “For quite a while.”
Jed grinned with realization. “Heat! Of course!” he said. “Adrification cools the body. Massaging gets the blood circulating, warms up the body, and must help release the adrium. Well, what are you all waiting for? Let’s get to work warming up the old man. We’re going to have to get out of here pretty soon before the Onion blows.”
We all stared down at Pa: his face stuck in a stupor, his fingers in a choke hold on his imaginary pom-poms, his hairy shins cocked off to the sides of his johnny gown. Then we looked at each other and sort of grimaced and giggled, all nervous and feeling ridiculous. Nobody wanted to touch him, until Ma dropped to Pa’s side and started to massage his thighs with a vengeance.
“Craig, honey, come back to us!”
I had an idea. “No, no, do his legs last. That way he can’t chase us when he comes to.”
Us kids started laughing then! We even got the chickens cackling. “Brilliant!” said Jed.
But Ma yelled at us. “You kids stop that joking around. He’s your father and he’s in serious trouble.” But she did move her massaging up to Pa’s arms.
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if Pa woke up on his good side?” Jed said in a dreamy voice.
Could that really happen? The thought of it took my breath away. At that moment the thing I wanted most in the world was for Pa to wake up and be his old self. In case he could hear, I said, “Sorry I was an idiot, Pa,” and got down on my knees to massage his face. Barbie worked on his chest, and we propped him onto his side so Jed could get behind him to do his back.
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