Now the station wagon was rattling down the road to the Itcheepatucknee springs. Heavy metal music blared from a boom box on the front passenger seat.
In the back, Peter stared up at the ceiling of the car. The fabric had come loose and was hanging slackly down. Mom’s little Honda was in pretty bad shape, but the Bodinskis’ ride made hers look like a brand new BMW.
As they approached the ranger’s station in the darkness, Peter wondered if it was all worth it. Stealing from his mother, stealing a car, driving without a license – and they still had another ten laws to break in the next half hour.
Then he remembered the dream and Greg’s face looking out of all those holes in the never-ending field. Peter shivered.
“You’re cold?” Dill asked in wonderment. He was dressed in about five layers of winter clothing, too, and was already trickling sweat from his buzzcut.
“No. Just remembering.”
Dill nodded and fell silent.
As the station wagon approached the park gate, its one working headlight illuminated a sign hanging from a white metal barrier:
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE – BY ORDER OF THE DUSKERVILLE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.
Woody hit the brakes and the car squeaked to a halt. “This is it, you dorks. I ain’t breakin’ the law.”
“You already are,” Dill countered.
Woody turned around and smacked Dill on the head again. Now, though, Dill had on three winter hats.
“Didn’t hurt,” Dill nyah-nyahed as he bolted out the door.
Peter got out, too, dragging their supplies behind him. Even before he shut the door all the way, Woody was backing up the car.
“I ain’t waitin’ for your sorry butts,” Woody sneered.
“Fine,” Peter said. Whatever dislike he’d originally felt for Woody had transformed into hatred over the last thirty minutes.
“Suckerrrrrrr,” Woody hooted. He put the station wagon into drive and roared back up the road towards home.
“How do you put up with him?” Peter wondered aloud to Dill.
“I keep hoping they’ll put him in jail some day.”
25
Now that the car’s yellow headlight was gone, the park was almost completely pitch black.
“Could we get a light?” Dill asked. “If I’m gonna get eaten, I’d like to at least see it coming.”
Peter rummaged in his backpack and handed a flashlight to Dill. Then he clicked on one for himself and shone it at the ground.
A dummy made out of Peter’s clothes lay on the dusty road. It looked fairly lifelike in the dark, if you ignored the lumpy jeans and the lack of hands or feet. It didn’t have a face, either, just a stuffed t-shirt, but the snow cap it wore helped disguise that fact. Pieces of duct tape covered it everywhere, keeping the pants anchored to the rain coat it wore, and the hat and head attached to the body.
“The backpack is kind of heavy,” Peter said. “Can you carry the dummy?”
Dill nodded, walked over to Peter, and tried to pick him up.
“Ha, ha, very funny,” Peter said without a trace of humor in his voice.
Dill pulled the real dummy up on his back like a soldier carrying a fallen comrade. Then he and Peter walked around the metal gate and warning sign. As they went, they kept their eyes and ears open for any sign of danger: giant swamp monsters…forest rangers…irate deputies…
But there was nothing and no one to be seen. The only thing they could hear was the scrunching of their own feet in the gravel and the burbling of the stream in the distance.
Soon they reached the three or four buildings that made up the rangers’ compound. The innertubes were all locked up with a metal chain pulled through their centers.
“We’re not going out in those, are we?” Dill asked in alarm.
“No, of course not.”
Instead, he headed for the large shack behind the innertubes. There was a latch and a heavy-duty padlock keeping the door closed. Peter opened up his backpack again and pulled out a small hatchet.
Dill’s eyes bugged out. “Uh, what’re you – ”
“Point your flashlight at the door,” Peter commanded. Once Dill obliged, Peter slammed the hatchet into the metal latch, ripping it halfway off the door.
KRA-CHANG!
“DUDE!” Dill hissed.
Peter put a finger to his lips. “Shhh…”
Both he and Dill strained to hear anything large and threatening in the early morning darkness, but there was nothing except the soft liquid sounds of the spring.
KRANGGGG! The rest of the latch cracked out of the wood. The still-locked padlock hung limply on the end of it.
Peter pulled open the shed door with a thrill of fear. He couldn’t believe what he was doing, or how easy it was, or how much trouble he was going to get into when they caught him.
I’m doing it to save a life, he reminded himself, and swung his flashlight beam into the shed.
The red kayaks hung on hooks in the wall. The yellow rafts stood upright on their sides to preserve space. The orange life preservers, still wet and smelly, were stacked in the corner. And beside the blue paddles sat the scuba tanks and masks.
Peter struggled to haul out one of the yellow rafts. “Get two blue paddles,” he ordered Dill. “And four life preservers.”
“Four?! Why?”
“Our clothes are so big, none of these are going to fit us. We’re gonna have to figure out how to tie two together and wear them that way.”
“There’s not even any adults around, and you want to wear life preservers? I’m not.”
“Dill, as soon as you hit the water all those sweaters you’re wearing are gonna swell up like one of those sponge thingies in the little pills.”
“The ones where you drop it in hot water, and it turns into a bunny or somethin’?”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“So you’ll sink to the bottom of the lake.”
“Oh.”
While Dill busied himself with the oars and life jackets, Peter snagged a scuba mask and a complicated tangle of hoses and dials. Then he tried to drag one of the scuba tanks out of the shed.
Ooof. The sucker was heavy. He had only moved it about six inches.
“Come on, help me with this,” he told Dill.
Dill helped Peter drag the metal cylinder out to their pile of stuff. “What do you want this for?”
“Just in case.” He didn’t tell Dill that it was part of the plan…just in case Dill didn’t like the plan and decided not to come along.
Once they had arranged their equipment, Peter picked up his flashlight and hatchet and walked over to the main ranger’s station building.
“What’re you – oh, dude, no,” Dill moaned.
“What if there’s something in there we can use?”
“Aren’t we in bad enough trouble as it is?”
“That’s the point. We’re in bad enough trouble as it is. How much worse can it get?”
“You say that, but you really don’t know,” Dill said. “Trust me, I know.”
“We’re about to go hunt down a swamp monster, and you’re worried about park rangers?”
Dill considered. “Okay, you have a point.”
Peter looked at the door. The wood was pretty solid, and there was a deadbolt above the handle. But there was that one big window, a single sheet of glass, just a few feet off the ground…
Peter shined his light through the window onto the desks and water cooler inside. Sitting on the floor were a bunch of walkie-talkies, plugged into the wall and charging.
“Stay back,” Peter warned Dill. Peter shielded his eyes and then smashed the hatchet into the glass.
KLSSSSSSHHHHH!
The whole window collapsed in a hundred little pieces. Glass was everywhere: on the ground, inside the building, even on Peter’s bulky sweater sleeves. He brushed them off with his gloved fingers.
Dill shook his head. “Oh my GOSH, you are either way cool, or waaaay stupid.�
�
“If I was doing this for fun, I’d be stupid,” Peter said as he used the hatchet to clear out the jagged pieces of glass still jutting up from the window sill.
“Instead, you’re doing it so you can chase down a giant frog monster. I’d say you’re still stupid.”
“You’re doing it with me, so you must be way stupid, too.”
“Well…” Dill was at a loss for words. “I know you are, but what am I?”
Peter climbed up through the window frame and into the ranger’s station. He got two of the walkie-talkies and then shined his light around, looking for anything else. He tried the desk drawers, but most were locked, and the ones that were open just had pencils or files in them.
He didn’t want to spend all night cracking open metal drawers and waiting for someone to find them, so he headed back for the window.
“Is there a gun in there?” Dill asked excitedly.
“No,” Peter said. “We couldn’t take a gun.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t know how to shoot a gun!”
“Uh-hunh! If you’ve seen movies and TV, you know how to shoot a gun.” Dill pointed his finger like a pistol and made a pow noise. “We’d kill that swamp monster quick if we had a gun.”
“Yeah, if you didn’t kill yourself or shoot a hole in the raft first,” Peter said.
“Whatever.”
“Yeah, whatever. No guns. Now help me haul this stuff down to the creek.”
In five minutes they were situated and ready to go. Peter was even wrong about the life preservers, which actually were big enough to fit over their layers of clothing. They just had to let the black straps waaaaaay out, as far as they reached.
Once the lifejackets were in place, they loaded up their supplies in the raft. As they were moving the scuba tank, Dill asked excitedly, “You gonna use this to kill the monster?”
“What? How’m I supposed to do that?” The tank was part of his plan, but not to kill anything.
“Haven’t you ever seen JAWS? Oh, wait, I forgot, your mom doesn’t let you watch anything cool.”
“She does too,” Peter scowled. “What’s JAWS?”
“It’s a really really really old movie, but it’s COOL. It’s all about this shark named Jaws and he’s eatin’ people and they try to catch him and he eats most of ‘em except they shove a scuba tank in his mouth and shoot it and it blows Jaws up. BOOM!”
“How are we supposed to blow it up?”
“See, that’s why I want a gun,” Dill explained, as though to a child.
“NO GUNS,” Peter repeated.
26
They positioned the raft half on the bank, half in the stream, and stepped in. They had to use the blue paddles to push off from the shore, but once they were in the main current, the raft moved along swiftly. The cylinder sunk down several inches into the rubber floor, but Peter reasoned that it was no heavier than him or Dill and therefore okay. He sat back and tried to relax. The raft was quite spacious, with more than enough room for everything they’d brought along.
“Now what’s the plan you said you’ve got?” Dill asked.
Peter flipped the dummy onto its back, unzipped a pocket on the rain jacket it wore, and plucked out an alarm clock. And not just any alarm clock: it was the hated, ancient, wind-up clanker that woke him for school every morning, the type with two little brass bells at the top that sounded like a fireman’s alarm going off.
“I don’t think the monster has eaten anybody,” Peter began, then paused. “Uh, yet.”
“Great,” Dill muttered. “Way to get me pumped up.”
Peter ignored him. “I think it injected them with stuff to paralyze them and keep them asleep. I got a little scratch, and I was out for hours…they’re probably gonna sleep for days, maybe even weeks. So if we find them in time, we can get them out.”
“So how’re we gonna find ‘em?”
“I’m gonna go out on the lake with the dummy here, and maybe the monster will attack.”
“WHAT?” Dill yelled.
“Quiet,” Peter shushed.
“Oh crap,” Dill said, and looked around at the darkness. “You think it’s here already?”
“No, but there might be rangers, and they might stop us if they hear you.”
“Well, if that’s your brilliant plan, to go out in the middle of the freakin’ lake so that thing can come after us, then I hope they DO stop us! That’s STUPID! I’m not doing that!”
“I know. I’m going alone,” Peter said.
“…huh?”
“I’m going with the dummy and you’re staying on the shore. We’ll each have a radio, so we can talk to each other. When it attacks, I’ll throw the dummy overboard, and hopefully it’ll take it back to its hideout.”
“Aaaaand that’s going to help us how?”
Peter held up the clock. “I’ve set it to go off in twenty minutes. If the monster doesn’t show up, I’ll keep resetting it till he does. He takes the dummy, the ringer will go off, and maybe we’ll be able to hear where the thing is keeping the other guys.”
“What if it’s, like, a hundred feet underwater? How’re we supposed to hear it then?”
“The monster got up out of the water and walked around, right? So I think it breathes air. Even if it does breathe in water, we don’t. If it really did knock out Greg and Rory, it’s probably stashing them somewhere they can breathe.”
“So once we hear the alarm clock and figure out where Rory and Greg are, then we hightail it back and tell everybody.”
“Yeah.”
“Sooooo if the monster attacks…and if it actually gets fooled by the dummy…and if it takes the dummy back…and if the alarm clock goes off…and if you can get back to shore before it eats you, too…then everything works out fine.”
“Uh…yeah.”
Dill nodded like he agreed. When he spoke, though, he didn’t.
“This is the STUPIDEST plan I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, it’s something,” Peter snapped. “If you can think of a better one, let me know.”
“How about this plan – we turn around, go home, and get back in bed.”
“After we’ve already broken into the rangers’ station, and ripped off my mom, and stole your parents’ car?”
“You mean after you broke into the rangers’ station, and you ripped off your mom, and Woody stole the car.”
“Oh, so you’re not involved at all,” Peter said sarcastically.
Dill spread his hands behind his head as he lay back in the raft, totally unconcerned. “I’m just an innocent bystander.”
“So you want to be an innocent bystander that leaves Greg and Rory behind?”
“Of course not…but dude, your plan sucks.”
“We’ve gotten lucky before.”
“Yeah, well, luck runs out.” Dill tapped the scuba tank with his foot. “You didn’t explain what this is for. And why are we wearing all these freakin’ clothes?”
“If our luck runs out.”
“Huh?”
“I got the idea from something I read…I bet its tongue can’t get through a ton of clothes, so if it tags us, we won’t pass out.”
Dill shook his head. “We’re doomed,” he muttered.
27
The spring carried them along quickly. On the way they were mostly silent, although every so often Dill would start in on “why did I let you talk me into this.” Peter would remind him of Greg being lifted up and carried off, and Dill would fall silent again for another few minutes.
When they started hearing frogs croaking, they knew they were getting closer. The reeds grew thicker around them and the spring narrowed. A softly drifting fog crept over the surface of the water. They had to break out the paddles to keep moving along.
They would pause at every odd sound and strain to detect a low, gurgling rumble, or the thud of giant feet in the mud. But every time they stopped, all they heard was the ribbiting of frogs.
After about fift
een minutes of pushing through the swamp, they reached the end of the bog and the beginning of the lake. Peter guided them over to the riverbank where they beached the raft and stepped onto the land. The fog crept slowly over the ground, only a few inches above the grass.
“Cool,” Dill said, and kicked at it. A little puff of white mist swirled around his shoes.
Peter wanted to play in the fog, too, but the heaviness in his chest kept him from joining in. Dill looked over at his friend, realized the seriousness of the situation, and turned back to the raft.
As they unloaded the backpack full of stuff, Dill asked one more time, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Actually, I really, really don’t,” Peter said grimly. “But I made a promise. Come on, let’s check the walkie-talkies.”
“Okay, now, I’ve seen a whole lotta movies with truckers and FBI agents and stuff, and when they talk on their radio, you say whatever you gotta say, and then you say ‘Over,’” Dill instructed as they turned on the radios.
“I’ve used walkie-talkies before, Dill,” Peter said.
“You have?”
“Yeah, my dad brought some home from work one time…”
Peter’s voice trailed off. He thought of his dad for a few seconds and wished that he was back in California, away from this thing in the lake and away from his promise, and that his dad had never left.
I wish for a lot of things, but they never come true, he thought sadly.
But I really, really need this one to.
Peter said a silent prayer that he would come out of this alive…him, and Greg, and Rory.
Dill grew uncomfortable in the silence, so he did what he always did when he got uncomfortable: he talked. “I’ve always wondered why they say ‘over,’ you know? Are they saying it cuz they’re like, ‘Okay, it’s going over to you now,’ or is it, ‘Okay, I’m done talking now, my turn is over, you can talk now,’ or maybe – ”
“DILL.”
PETER AND THE VAMPIRES (Volume One) (PETER AND THE MONSTERS) Page 34
