by David Pogue
Eliza, now with a very sore bump on the top of her head, was not thrilled. “What are you talking about? I’m already across!”
“You have to come back. It’s the only way,” Abby said.
“Who’s gonna push me?”
“Just push with your feet. Kick off from the door frame.”
“And what then? What happens once I’m back over there?”
“I’ll tell you once you get here!”
With an enormous sigh, Eliza lay down at the far end of the hallway, levitated herself, and gave herself a push. She glided smoothly across the floor and coasted to a stop—three feet from the end of the hallway.
“Help!” she hissed, desperately trying to keep the image of buffalo in her head.
Ben fell to his knees and reached out with his hand, but she was a few inches too far away.
“Maybe your leg?” said Abby.
Ben sat down, leaned back on his elbows, and stretched his feet out toward Eliza. He couldn’t reach her armpits, but he managed to hook the toe of one shoe under her chin—and gave her a tug.
“Ee www!” said Eliza, despite herself. She sailed to the safe part of the floor just as she forgot to think of the buffalos—and she scraped down for a landing.
“Did you have to stick your stinky foot in my face?”
Ben stood up, brushing off his pants. “Well, actually, kind of yeah. Either that or leave you floating in the hallway until we all get caught.”
Clearly, this was not Eliza’s favorite morning. And it was about to get worse.
“All right,” she said to Abby. “Now I’m back. What’s your bright idea?”
“Now, I know you’re not gonna like this,” Abby said as respectfully as she could. “I just want you to know that you’re really the hero, Eliza. You’re making this possible by generously using your power to get us out of here.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. What’s your idea?”
Abby took a breath. “Okay. Well, is there any weight limit to your power? I mean, could it carry you and someone else?”
Suddenly, Eliza understood where Abby was going.
“Oohhhhhhh, no you don’t,” she said, waving her hands in front of her face. “I am not going to float down that hallway with you guys sitting on top of me. No way. Forget it. I’m not some stinking flying carpet!”
The funny thing was, when she had floated across the hallway floor, wearing that huge floppy sweater, Eliza had actually looked a lot like a flying carpet.
“Won’t you consider it?” said Ben. “You’re our only hope.”
“Yeah,” said Ricky. “Please?”
“When they write the history books, you’ll be the one who saved the day,” Abby added.
Eliza glared at them. “You’re all ganging up on me!”
“We’re just asking,” said Abby gently.
Finally, Eliza gave a grunt of frustration—sort of a “HhhrrreeeeaAAAAAGHHH!!”—and lay down on her back again. “All right. But you people owe me big time.” She spread her arms out.
Abby didn’t give Eliza a chance to change her mind. “Okay, Ricky. You first. Climb up.”
After some fumbling, they figured out that the best way to ride was to sit on Eliza’s stomach, facing forward. Ricky rested his feet on her shoulders; he leaned back so that his hands gripped her ankles. It looked and felt a lot like sledding, actually—at least to Ricky.
To Eliza, it was pure discomfort. “All right, let’s get this over with,” she muttered. She closed her eyes and lifted slightly off the floor. Fortunately, magic doesn’t care about weight or mass; Eliza discovered that levitating with Ricky was no more difficult than levitating without him.
“Okay, Ben. Help me push,” said Abby.
“Not so hard this time!” Eliza hissed.
“We know, we know,” said Ben. “Ricky—stop her with your feet.”
Ben and Abby realized that they didn’t dare push Eliza too lightly, because then she’d be stranded in the middle of the hallway with nobody to pull her to safety. So on the count of three, they gave Eliza a decent shove down the hallway.
She sailed across the floor; it was all Ricky could do not to shout “Yee-haw!” Just as she was about to thud against the far door, Ricky stuck his feet forward to act as bumpers, so Eliza didn’t crack her head again.
It actually worked out pretty well. Ricky was safely across.
Then it was Abby’s turn. As she scooched onto Eliza’s stomach, she pulled the hard-boiled egg from her pocket and handed it back to Ben. “Hold this a minute,” she said.
“What’s this for?” he said, mystified.
“Insurance.”
In another minute, Eliza had ferried Abby across, too. But Ben was a problem; since he was the last one to go, there was nobody to push Eliza down the hallway.
There was, however, a thin handrail on the side of the hallway. In the end, Ben had the bright idea of pulling himself along the railing, hand over hand, basically dragging Eliza along with him.
It was quite a sight: a sixth-grade girl, floating on her back, her multicolored floppy sweater spread out like a bat’s wings; a skinny fourteen-year-old boy sitting on her stomach as though on a toboggan, dragging himself along a handrail; a short, round-headed kid at the end of the hallway, jumping up and down and occasionally counting by twos in Spanish to keep the security cameras fogged up; and Abby, chewing the ends of her shiny dark hair out of pure nerves.
When Ben and Eliza were halfway across, Abby began yell-whispering to him. “Ben! Put the egg down, okay? Just put it in the middle of the floor as you go by! Set it down!”
Ben paused, baffled, one hand on the railing, and set the egg down in the hallway. Then he continued tugging his floating girl barge along the wall.
It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t quick. But finally, all four kids had reached the end of the hallway.
Only a few seconds later, they were running through the lobby they had entered the day they arrived, fogging security cameras as they ran.
At last, at 2:11 a.m., they burst out through the front doors into the cool summer night. They stood panting just outside the building, deliriously proud and happy that their plan had worked.
Then they heard the click—and were blasted by lights and sound.
CHAPTER
23
Gates
THE ALARMS WENT OFF a fraction of a second after all the lights came on—lights both inside and outside the Calabra building.
Ben was the first to come to his senses. “They heard us!” he shouted.
“Oh, no!” shrieked Ricky, completely panicked.
“It’s over,” muttered Eliza. “Figures.”
“It’s not over,” Abby said. “You guys—get going up the hill. Run out to the road at the top. I’ll be there in a second.”
“What are you gonna do?” asked Ben. “If you stay here, they’re going to catch you!”
“No, they’re not,” Abby said. “For once in my life, I think my dumb little power might actually be useful. Now get going! I mean it!”
“I agree,” intoned Eliza. “If she wants to get caught, fine. But I’m outta here.” And she started up the hill. Ricky and Ben reluctantly trotted after her.
Abby suddenly felt incredibly alone. The little insurance-policy idea that had seemed so smart a few minutes ago suddenly seemed risky and foolish.
But she took a breath and ran back into the building. She stopped just at the beginning of the motion-sensor hallway, which was already echoing with the sound of excited men’s voices approaching from inside the building.
Abby scanned the hallway floor until she spotted the little white dot she was looking for—the egg that Ben had left there. She backed slowly away, hoping to get as far away as possible and still keep her eyes on that egg. If all the lights hadn’t been on, it might have been hard to spot; but as it was, Abby could see it even from halfway into the front lobby.
These days Abby can’t tell you whether one minute or one seco
nd passed before she saw the black-shirted security men burst into view at the far end of the hallway; with all the buzzing and blinking and pounding in her ears, time turned into a hopeless knot.
One thing she knew for sure: she had to activate the motion sensors before the men could reach the control box to turn them off. And the way to do that was to spin the egg.
Abby had never, ever attempted to spin an egg from so far away. And she had no idea if it would work.
She tugged her ears. For the first second, nothing happened—but then, the egg, so far away that it was barely visible, actually began to spin. The motion cameras saw movement at floor level and did what they were designed to do, just as Abby had desperately hoped: they triggered the metal gates at both ends of the hallway.
The guards arrived at the far end of the hallway just in time to see the metal gates clattering down from the ceiling. Some of them were swearing and shouting and grabbing the metal gate to stop it from reaching the floor. But the gate motors were too strong.
“TURN IT OFF! TURN THE DARN THING OFF!” shouted a familiar voice. It sounded like Kermit the Frog having a really bad day.
“I’m trying, all right? Calm yourself, for the love of Peter!” That was Ferd’s voice—the last one Abby heard, echoing down the corridor, as she bolted for the front lobby.
Ferd fumbled at the control panel. He turned a key. He slapped two illuminated buttons to shut off the sensors. He waited with the others for the metal gates to open again. He ran with them down the deactivated hallway toward the front entrance.
But Abby had done what she wanted to do: gained a four-minute head start for her friends.
By the time Ferd, Phil Shutter, and the guards made it out of the building, Abby was halfway up the broad grassy slope of the Calabra valley—halfway to rejoining Ben, Eliza, and Ricky, who had almost reached the street.
CHAPTER
24
Hitchhikers
AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW, Abby didn’t write this book herself. It’s her story, of course, and what you’re reading here is pretty much the way she tells it. But she didn’t write this book—I did. And it’s only fair to tell you how I got involved.
I was driving through Pennsylvania on my way home from a business meeting one night—really, really late at night. I was getting so sleepy, I thought I should stop somewhere and get some coffee. And that’s why I was driving more slowly than usual on the highway at about 2:30 in the morning.
Suddenly, in my headlights, I saw a little clump of junior high school–age kids standing on the side of the road. They were jumping up and down, waving their arms to flag me down. They seemed pretty frantic about it; something was obviously wrong.
So I steered my Prius onto the side of the road and pulled up a few yards away. These crazy kids came running over to the car. I rolled down the window.
“You kids all right?” I asked.
They were all talking at once, and panting hard at the same time, so it was a little hard to figure out exactly what they wanted. But finally, the girl with the dark hair shushed the other kids and spoke directly to me.
“We need a ride, and we need to use your cell phone,” she said, out of breath. “It’s really, really important. Please. Please. We just ran all the way up the hill from way down there.”
The tall boy spoke up, again with incredible urgency in his voice. “We’re being chased! Can you help us? Please?”
I have to admit, this didn’t seem right to me at all. I had no idea what these guys were running away from. For all I knew, they had just busted out of kiddie jail. I didn’t want to get in trouble by helping them.
“What are you running away from?”
“Them!” said the redheaded girl in the huge sweater, pointing down the long grassy hill. For the first time, I could see moving flashlights coming up from the bottom of the hill. I could just hear voices shouting and a couple of car engines starting up, too. “They’re going to want to capture us back. Please, sir!”
“Look,” I said. “I’d love to help you, I really would. But I could be arrested for kidnapping you!”
The dark-haired girl—of course, it was Abby—put her hands on my car window frame and spoke intensely.
“We don’t have time to explain this,” she said. “We just want to get back to our parents!”
The men’s voices from the hill were getting louder.
Abby suddenly seemed to have a new idea. “Listen: If you’re worried about being arrested, then why don’t you drive us straight to a police station? That way, you don’t have to worry. If we’re running away from jail, they’ll put us right back in. And if we’re telling the truth, then the police will help us get back home! Okay?”
The whole business sounded crazy to me. But I had to admit, her logic was pretty solid. Besides—every now and then, you’ve got to listen to your gut. Meanwhile, the voices, lights, and cars were getting closer, fast.
“All right,” I said. “Get in.”
Three of the kids climbed in back, and the oldest one sat in front. They closed the doors. Two men’s voices were shouting at me from only fifty yards away. If I waited about three more seconds, I’d be able to make out what they were saying.
But I didn’t. I drove. I had no idea where to find a police station in the middle of the night in a strange part of the country, but I figured I could pull into a gas station to ask.
“What are your names?”
They told me. Ricky asked me my name, and what I did for work.
“I’m David,” I answered. “I write for the New York Times.”
“Oh . . . my . . . gosh,” said Abby, behind me. “I think you’re exactly the person we need to talk to.”
And that’s how it happened. That’s how I got to know Abby Carnelia: driving along a deserted Pennsylvania highway in the middle of the night.
They told me everything during that dark ride, overlapping, shouting, interjecting: about the summer camps around the country, about these one-in-a-thousand children with their useless little powers, about the giant company that was trying to pick them apart and turn them into the sources of the next billion-dollar drug. It all sounded like farfetched fiction to me. Yet their details were so precise, and their stories fit together so perfectly, that I grew increasingly curious.
They took turns using my cell phone to call their parents. You want to know the most amazing part of the whole thing? Abby’s parents were only about 45 minutes away. Apparently, they had received an e-mail message from her that day, did a little research on Calabra, and piled into the family car to rescue her. They’d already been driving for hours.
In the end, they met us at the police station in Moroville, Pennsylvania, in the wee—very wee—hours of the morning. It was all happy chaos: Mrs. Carnelia wrapped her arms around Abby like an octopus and wouldn’t let go; she just kept chanting, “Oh, Abby. Oh, Abby. Oh, Abby.” Mr. Carnelia threw his arms around them both, spinning the whole group around and around. Ryan waited anxiously for his turn, standing nearby until there was hugging room.
“You did the code!” he shouted, his face lit up. “You did the code! Mom showed it to me and I knew how to read it! It really worked, right, Ab? It really worked!”
Since Abby’s father was an airline pilot, he was able to arrange flights for the other parents so they could pick up their kids in the morning.
There was food to be ordered, and hotel rooms to be booked, and a whole lot of explaining to do.
But by 7:00 a.m., I had already spoken to my editor at the newspaper, and I knew my next step: I needed to pay a little visit to Calabra Pharmaceuticals. Something told me that there was quite a story waiting to be written for the paper.
Or maybe even a book.
CHAPTER
25
Afterward
“I’M CHAD FRESNO, and this . . . is Been There, Done That!”
The studio audience cheered wildly for as long as the little man with the headset ran around waving the APPLAUSE sig
n back and forth.
Chad Fresno, Abby noticed, was what her dad called a “three-lumper.” His hair looked like three carefully frozen, shiny lumps of plastic: one on top, one on each side of his head. He sat down in the swiveling leather chair across from Abby on the mini-stage.
“Every week, we introduce you to someone who’s lived an experience that the rest of us encounter only in our dreams—or our nightmares,” he said to the TV camera. “And today, we bring you a young lady we’ve plucked right out of the headlines.” Abby smiled, but her stomach had turned to nervous Jell-O.
The chance to appear on national TV had seemed like it would be really cool—and it had been cool, especially when a limousine had arrived to pick up the Carnelias and take them to New York City for the show.
The bright TV lights made it hard to see any faces in the audience, but Abby knew that her family was out there. So was her best friend, Morgan, who had insisted on coming along in case Abby needed a bodyguard. Even No-H Sara had made the trip to the city to see Abby’s big TV moment.
“It’s been in all the papers, it’s been all over the Internet: last week, police raided the Pennsylvania headquarters of Calabra Pharmaceuticals,” Chad was saying to the camera. “Inside, they found twenty-one children being held virtually prisoner, far from home and facing medical experimentation against their will. Calabra, we now know, had built a chain of five summer camps as a sort of hunting ground for kids with special abilities.”
On the TV monitors, Abby could see video being played back. It showed a bunch of police cars driving down the long, sloping driveway of Calabra’s valley headquarters, lights flashing. There was a shot of Phil being escorted out of the building by two officers, and even a glimpse of what Abby thought she recognized as Ferd’s ponytail bouncing along in the group behind.
“Today on Been There, Done That, we welcome a very special guest: the young lady who first uncovered the scheme and helped bring Calabra Pharmaceuticals to justice. Please help me welcome seventh grader Abby Carnelia!”
There was cheering and applause. Abby shoved her hair behind her ears nervously.
