by Mac Barnett
Ah! The thrill of the chase! Was there anything better? Maybe the next part, the thrill of the catch. And the part after that, the thrill of the beatdown. When Josh really thought about it, it was all pretty good. And thrilling!
Josh spied a green-and-purple clump just off the trail. He kneeled and picked up a pair of suits made from flowers.
Camouflage. Very clever. Josh knew of only two dumb nimbuses smart enough to come up with something like this.
“What is it, sir?”
Mudflap had caught up with his leader and was standing at a respectful distance.
“Couple of ghillie suits,” Josh said. “They probably ditched them so they could run faster.”
Mudflap nodded, impressed.
But was he sufficiently impressed? The cadet’s face held something other than the expression of unalloyed admiration Josh expected from his charges. Was it doubt? Did Mudflap doubt his tracking abilities? Was that what was in his face? Doubt? Or insolence? Or doubt and insolence?
(In fact, Mudflap was just afraid of getting hit in the head with a stick, like his brother.)
Josh pressed his nose into the damp suits and inhaled deeply. “They’re close. Very close,” he said, then coughed violently because he had some garlic in his nose.
The forest filled with answering coughs.
“That wasn’t a turkey vulture cough, Splinters!” Mudflap called to his brother, trying to be helpful. “Major Barkin is actually just on the ground coughing! I think he got something in his nose!”
What was this nimbus thinking? Josh leapt to his feet. There was purple rage in his face and a brown stick in his hand.
“What did you tell your brother that for, Mudflap?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“What is this, a mutiny? Are you a mutineer, Mudflap?”
“No, sir.”
Josh raised his stick.
“Step closer, Mudflap. Get in stick range.”
“Sir?”
But Mudflap was saved by news from Splinters. “I see them!”
Josh let out a joyous bellow. He dropped the stick and resumed the hunt.
“Over here!”
“They’re running!”
“There! There!”
Josh ran. He tore through the trees.
Mudflap stood on a tree stump and pointed due north.
“That way! That way!”
Josh ran.
There! Ahead. Maybe fifty yards away. Two boys. They appeared in flashes, between the trees. Josh recognized them immediately. Miles Murphy. Niles Sparks. The banes of the Barkins. Nimbuses. Nemeses.
Now this was personal.
Of course, it had gotten personal as soon as they’d stolen that flag, which Josh had designed himself. The rattlesnake skeleton being a symbol of him personally—Josh was fierce, like a rattlesnake, and really cool, like a skeleton—as well as a symbol of Papa Company. And of course Papa Company was also personal, since really what was Papa Company but an extension of Josh’s person, specifically the fist part of his person, a figurative fist that was now on its way to punching those two jokers in their literal heads.
Anyway, now it was really, really personal.
Josh ran.
The blond one, Niles, was getting tired. He never had been much of an athlete. And as long as Miles kept waiting up for his little friend, Josh would be able to catch them both. Thirty-five yards. Josh grinned. He ran.
Josh couldn’t believe his luck! These nimbuses were headed straight for the meadow. A great wide meadow by a mossy pond, with a few dumb trees and nowhere to hide. They’d be easily spotted, easily caught, easily thrashed. Yes! Josh would thrash those two nimbuses and then throw them in the pond! But he had to remember to get his flag back before the pond part, or else the flag would get all wet.
“To the meadow!” Josh cried.
Josh glimpsed them again—no more than twenty yards ahead. He splashed through a creek. Close now. Almost to the meadow. Branches whipped his arms. Thorns pierced his calves where his camp socks had fallen down. But Josh felt no pain. He ran. He ran.
The woods thinned and then stopped, and Josh charged into the meadow. A bevy of quail startled and beat a low path toward the pond.
“What the glug?” said Josh.
The meadow was empty.
He got down on his hands and knees to study the ground. There. Bootprints. Miles and Niles had emerged from the woods right there. The trail led from the trees, into the meadow, and then stopped. The bootprints vanished. Had they taken off their shoes? They wouldn’t have had time. He’d been right on their tails.
Josh shielded his eyes from the sun and scanned the area. A warm breeze ruffled the tops of the grasses. Woodcocks frolicked. A pair of swans paddled placidly in the pond. Chipmunks played chase in the branches of an elm tree. It was disgusting.
Josh walked over to the elm tree and punched it.
A few mikes later, the rest of Papa Company tumbled into the meadow and found their commander standing in the grass, sucking on his knuckles.
“What happened, sir?” asked Mudflap.
Josh took his fingers out of his mouth.
“They disappeared.”
Papa Company stood silent in the sunny meadow.
“They just disappeared,” said Josh.
The twins had the same question, but neither wanted to ask it.
How the heck can two kids just disappear?
Chapter
5
It’s a pretty good question: How the heck can two kids just disappear?
And the answer is: Sod.
Now: What is sod?
I’m glad you asked!
This is sod:
It’s basically a carpet of dirt and grass. Lay it down on the ground and—boom!—now you have a lawn, a football field, or a mini-golf course. There are rolls and rolls of sod for sale at hardware stores, gardening shops, and sod emporiums. Yawnee Valley Feed Supply in downtown Yawnee Valley sells five kinds of sod: bluegrass, Bermuda, tall fescue, dwarf fescue, and meadow mix, which retails at fifty cents a square foot. The day before they disappeared, Niles Sparks, four feet nine inches tall, and Miles Murphy, five foot one, bought ten square feet of sod for five bucks and carried it out to the woods.
HOW TO JUST DISAPPEAR IN 4 EASY STEPS, USING SOD
Step 1: Miles and Niles dug one hole each, as long as they were tall, as wide as they were wide, as deep as they were deep.
“It’s like we’re digging our own tombs!” said Niles.
“Yikes,” said Miles.
Step 2: They covered their holes with sod.
“Make sure you leave a little air tunnel,” said Niles. “Otherwise you’ll end up buried alive.”
“Come on, man!”
Step 3: They each propped up one end of their sod with a big stick, like so:
“Well?” Miles leaned on his shovel. “Anything morbid to say?”
Niles smiled sweetly and ran his fingers across the turf. “Walt Whitman calls grass the uncut hair of graves.”
“I don’t know who that is, and I don’t want to know who that is,” said Miles.
Step 4: Twenty-four hours later, with Josh Barkin in hot pursuit, Miles and Niles exploded into the meadow. Niles could feel his lungs beating against his rib cage. He breathed in great gulps but still couldn’t get enough air. He hated running.
“Come on!” Miles said.
He’d paused again to let Niles catch up.
Josh was crashing around in the woods behind them.
Miles held out his hand for Niles to slap as he ran by. Together they dashed across the meadow, over to the elm. They threw themselves into their holes and knocked away the sticks. The sod covered their bodies. By the time Josh got to the meadow, Miles and Niles were invisible, lying beneath blankets woven of hopeful green stuff. Sod!
Chapter
6
Under his sod, surrounded on all sides by damp, rich dirt, Niles could hear Papa Company talking up above:
“Maybe they doubled back into the woods, sir.”
“Don’t be a nimbus. I would have seen them.”
“Maybe they spontaneously combusted, sir.”
“I wish.”
“Maybe they’re up in that elm tree, sir.”
“Maybe they doubled back into the woods and you didn’t see them, sir.”
“Maybe they’re in the pond, sir.”
“. . .”
“And they’re breathing through snorkels. Or straws. Sir.”
“Yeah! Or they’re wearing scuba gear, sir!”
“Sir, they could have gotten into a bathysphere that they had parked by the pond, just waiting.”
“What’s a bathysphere?”
“It’s like a submarine.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say submarine, Mudflap? Bathysphere!”
“Ooh! Sir! Maybe they turned into swans!”
“What?”
“Swans. Those swans, sir!”
“There are two of them, sir!”
“They’re not wizards, you nimbuses. They’re pranksters. They go to my school. A couple nimbuses who call themselves the Terrible Twos.”
Underground, Niles rolled his eyes and corrected Josh: “The Terrible Two.” He said it so softly that only an earthworm, who was crawling near his face, could have heard him, if earthworms had ears, which they don’t. They don’t have eyes either. Niles wondered whether earthworms had mouths, and especially whether they had teeth, and he hoped they didn’t, because now the earthworm was crawling on his face. This kind of stuff happens when you’re hiding out below the earth.
Anyway, back to Josh:
“They got away from us. But we’ll find them. They’ve been hanging out in the woods all summer. We’ll track them down. We will retake our flag. And we will have our revenge. We will prank them like you wouldn’t believe. We will throw sticks at their heads. We will poke them with the sharp parts of these medals. We will fill a sock with oranges and thwomp them. We will prank those pranksters so hard they will never want to prank again.”
Chapter
7
(Obviously Josh doesn’t really understand what a prank is.)
(But that doesn’t make him any less scary.)
(Actually, it probably makes him more scary.)
Chapter
8
When they were sure the cadets had left the meadow, Miles and Niles rose up out of the ground, gasping fresh air. They had dirt in their hair. They had dirt in their clothes. They had dirt in their mouths.
It was worth it.
They sat in their trenches and laughed. They rested their elbows on the grass and laughed. They laughed so hard they had to lie back down in their holes.
Niles stared up at a cloudless sky. He was completely content, so happy to be relaxing post-prank in the cool earth that he almost forgot to check his watch.
“Ninety-six minutes.” He removed a notebook from his pocket and noted the time. It was a record: the longest time spent continuously pranking. Niles recorded stuff like this for a book he was planning, a tome, really: The History of the Terrible Two, which would be for sale in the gift shop of their museum, as well as fine bookstores everywhere.
“You want to get out of these holes? There’s a bunch of bugs and worms down here.”
“That’s redundant,” said Niles. “Worms are bugs.”
“No, bugs are like beetles and flies and stuff. Insects.”
Niles thought it over. “Would you say a spider is a bug?” he asked.
“Of course! Classic bug.”
“Well, a spider’s not an insect. It’s an arachnid.”
“I know that. Everybody knows that. Don’t spoil the occasion.”
“What occasion?” Niles asked.
“Our longest consecutive prank.”
“You knew!”
Niles smiled.
So did Miles.
They stood up, walked across the meadow, and disappeared into the forest.
Chapter
9
Like any self-respecting outlaws, Miles and Niles had a lair: a cave deep in the woods that only they knew about. To get there, you had to cross a log that a storm had blown over a creek. (The creek wasn’t deep—it went up to their calves—but the log was more fun, and who likes wet socks?) A blackberry tangle seemed to block off the way, but a secret path took you safely through brambles, into a ravine that wound down through tall rocks and spilled out into a little green glade with a brook and a cave. The mouth of the cave was in the side of a hill, surrounded by rocks that were covered in moss. The cave wasn’t big, but it was their home in the woods: the prank lab west, summer HQ of the Terrible Two.
They spent many days in their cave. Sometimes they slept over out there. Miles’s mom didn’t really like Niles’s parents. She found them “aloof.” (She wasn’t wrong.) Because Ms. Murphy almost never talked to Mr. and Mrs. Sparks, emancipation was easy. Miles would say he was sleeping at Niles’s, and Niles would say he was sleeping at Miles’s, and the boys would sneak off, bound for wild blooms, birdsong, and liberty in Yawnee Valley Regional Park and Outdoor Recreational Area.
Their lair was kitted out comfortably: sleeping bags on pads of soft forest grass, flashlights, snacks, books in tall stacks, a rock Miles thought was a fossil but wasn’t, a doorknob, feathers from twelve kinds of birds, a ladder, string, a big piece of fool’s gold, some animal’s leg bones that still bent at the knee (Miles said a coyote, Niles said fox), two duck calls (one each), two chairs, tools, paper and pens, everything you need for croquet, six different board games, a hand-carved chess set, a cigar box containing good skipping stones, blankets, warm hats, and portable speakers so Niles could still play all his tunes.
And now they had a flag.
“It doesn’t exactly go with the place, does it?” said Niles.
“No. It freaks me out.”
“Yeah.”
They stared at the flag for a while.
A long while.
Even longer.
“You know, maybe we should turn it around,” Miles said.
Miles took the flag from the wall and held it in front of his body.
“It looks like the snake swallowed your body up to the neck, and he’s going for your head!” said Niles.
Miles looked down and frowned.
“No. It looks like my skeleton is made of snake bones!”
“How is that any better?”
Miles shrugged. “I don’t know. Seems better than being eaten.”
“OK.”
Miles hung the flag back up backward. Now it was a blank black field on their wall.
“Much better,” said Miles.
Niles agreed. “Let’s go outside.”
An oak tree grew beside the creek. It had spiky leaves, silver bark, and two ropes tied around its trunk. One rope was red, one rope was blue, and both ran from the tree into the stream. Niles tugged on the blue rope, which was tied to a bottle of lemonade submerged in the cool water. Then he pulled the red rope and fished out a bottle of iced tea. The creek kept the drinks cold. Niles poured two Arnold Palmers.
Miles made a toast.
“In victory!”
They clinked their mugs.
The drinks were delicious.
“Oh!” said Niles. “And we have fruit cocktail!”
They spent the afternoon lying in the grass outside their cave, listening to music on their tiny speakers. Niles was playing only songs that had whistling.
“Who’s this?” Miles asked.
“Otis Redding,” said Niles.
“He’s a good whistler,” said Miles.
“Yeah,” said Niles.
Miles watched his friend listen to the whistling. Niles’s eyes were unfocused. He was chewing his lip. Niles was there in the glade, but he was also somewhere else. Miles knew what was going on: He was replaying their prank in his head. He was dissecting it. He was reliving it. He was experiencing their prank as it happened, and versions of their p
rank that never happened, versions where things went even better, versions where things went horribly awry. After a good prank, Miles felt relaxed. But Niles? Niles stayed keyed up for hours.
“Who’s this?” Miles asked.
Niles’s eyes refocused.
“Ennio Morricone.”
“That’s who’s whistling?”
“No. That’s the composer. Alessandro Alessandroni is who’s whistling.”
“He’s a good whistler,” said Miles. “And he’s got a good name.”
“One of the best whistlers,” said Niles. “And one of the best names.”
How did Niles know all this stuff? The names of Italian whistlers. What leeks looked like. Walt Whitman. Miles wondered whether he should know all this stuff too. More than that, Miles wondered whether Niles thought he should know all this stuff. Was Niles ever disappointed with him? Miles had known Niles for twenty-three months. They’d been best friends for more than half that time. But sometimes he still worried: Why me? Why did Niles choose me to be his best friend?
Niles was moving his mouth now, but no words came out. His face was animated. He was having a conversation with someone who wasn’t there, and it looked like an intense one.
Niles sat up and made an announcement.
“He really steams me.”
Miles took a guess. “Josh?”
“Yeah! I mean, anybody can call themselves a prankster. But actually pulling a prank? A real prank? That’s a lot harder. That takes wit. That takes finesse. That takes imagination.”
Miles nodded. When Niles got worked up like this, it was best to just let him go.
“So you tell someone to walk up close to you, just so you can throw a stick at his head? Ha ha.” (Niles actually said “Ha ha.”) “Well. So what? What does that prove? That you can boss people around? Well! Pranks do not belong to the powerful! The prank is too fine an instrument for a brute’s clumsy fingers!”
Niles was standing now.
“The prank belongs to the powerless! It is the mustache across the dictator’s portrait, the tweak of the tyrant’s nose. Josh Barkin, there’s a guy who needs his nose tweaked. He gives pranksters a bad name. He gives Barkins a bad name.”
