“Of course he’s not!” JJ agreed.
“My bad,” Cecil shook his head. “How about I cut out my tongue?”
I knew he was trying to be funny, but I was in no mood to laugh. Especially not when I looked up and saw Ricky Ratner and a half-dozen seventh-graders blocking our path.
Cecil and I froze. JJ reached into her shoulder bag and dug out the walkie-talkie.
“Should I call for help?” she whispered.
“Who you gonna call?” Cecil said out of the side of his mouth. “Captain Nobody’s standing right here.”
“Oh, right,” she whimpered.
“I gave you an order!” Ricky Ratner barked as he and his posse approached. “You were supposed to tell your brother’s classmates at Fillmore to stop hasslin’ my cousin Reggie.”
“Are they still doing stuff?” I asked.
“Don’t act all innocent,” Ricky scowled. “They’re torturing him. People’re callin’ forty times a night and wakin’ up the family. They order Chinese takeout and give Reggie’s address. And last night, y’know what they did to the Charger?”
Everybody knows the Merrimac Charger. He’s this huge bronze guy on horseback who towers over the front lawn of Merrimac High School.
“They painted ‘Blame Reggie’ all over it,” Ricky yelled. “‘Blame Reggie!’ Your brother’s friends did that!”
“But his brother didn’t,” Cecil shouted back, “cuz he’s lying in a hospital!”
“Thanks to your cousin,” JJ added.
“Nobody can prove that!” Ricky roared, bearing down on me. “You show me one eyewitness who saw my cousin even come close to your . . . yaaaaaaah!”
Ricky recoiled at the sight of Ferocious, who—hearing all the noise—had suddenly reared up in his cage.
“What is that?” Ricky demanded. “Looks like a big, long rat.”
His pals clustered around the cage as I pulled it to my chest.
“It’s not a rat,” JJ sniffed. “It’s a ferret—a member of the weasel family.”
“And this one’s famous,” Cecil boasted. “If you’ve ever been to a Fillmore football game—”
“I only cheer for cousin Reggie’s school,” Ricky snarled.
“Well, this one’s name is Ferocious—”
I shot Cecil a warning look, but it was too late.
“‘Ferocious’?” Ricky’s eyebrows arched. “As in the Ferocious Ferrets of Fillmore?”
He waited for one of us to nod, but no one did.
“He’s their mascot, right? Like the Charger of Merrimac?”
Cecil and I exchanged worried looks, and JJ tried to change the subject by exclaiming, “Ferocious is on a goodwill tour! I’m sure he’ll be visiting the seventh grade any day now.”
“Unless something unfortunate happens to him,” Ricky taunted, looking around at his buddies. He gave a nod of his head, and suddenly everybody was trying to yank the cage out of my arms.
“Let go!” I yelled. “Stop it!”
JJ and Cecil tried to pull them off. “You don’t want to mess with Captain Nobody,” Cecil shouted, and JJ added, “This guy stopped a robbery yesterday! Don’t you guys watch the news?”
But none of my attackers seemed impressed. They continued to scratch and claw at the cage, as poor Ferocious bounced back and forth from his water dish to his running wheel.
Suddenly, in the mad scramble, the cage door flew open and Ferocious shot up into the air. He landed on a patch of lawn, rolled over a few times and sat up, stunned by his newfound freedom.
Ferocious stared at us; we stared at him. And then, in a blink, Ferocious took off down the block like his tail was on fire.
Cecil, JJ and I screamed, “No, wait!” and raced after him. Behind us, Ricky and his buddies fell all over themselves with laughter.
As I ran, I dropped Ferocious’s cage and threw off my backpack. JJ and Cecil tossed theirs aside, as well. We tore after my furry friend as he scampered across three front yards and then darted through a vegetable garden and under a thorny hedge. We tried to keep up, huffing and puffing and yelling, “Come back, Ferocious! Come back!”
We chased him down a dead-end street, where I thought we might have a chance of cornering him, but he ran down an embankment and through a wall of tall trees. We all tumbled down after him, and I fought my way through the trees to find myself at—the highway!
Ten feet in front of me, Ferocious had screeched to a halt on the shoulder of the road. I stopped, my pulse pounding. JJ and Cecil ran up alongside me, panting. We looked to each other in horrified silence as cars whizzed by, inches from Ferocious’s twitching nose.
“Omigosh!” JJ gasped. “What’re we gonna do?”
“Maybe we could lure him back this way,” Cecil suggested in a low voice. “Does anybody have any raw meat?”
JJ and I looked at him, bewildered.
“Okay. Dumb question,” he admitted. “But we shouldn’t all go after him. That’s only gonna freak him out.”
“You know what this is, don’t you?” JJ asked with great seriousness. “This is a job for Captain Nobody.”
I almost gagged. “What?”
“She’s right!” Cecil agreed. “After all, you’re the one who got to take Ferocious home for the night.”
“Only because you volunteered me!” I hissed.
“And look at him,” JJ said. “It’s like he’s expecting you.”
She was right. Sort of. Ferocious had been looking back at the three of us, but now he seemed to zero in on me. He tilted his head the way he had when I told him that I was Chris Newman’s brother. In that moment, I felt very responsible for him.
Cecil clapped me on the back. “If anybody can do it, Captain Nobody can.”
I took a deep breath. Locking eyes with Ferocious, I carefully inched my way across the narrow patch of gravel, fallen leaves and tree limbs that separated us. Ferocious watched me coming with a curious stare. This just might work, I thought as I drew near.
Just then, a passing motorist, who probably thought I was tiptoeing onto the asphalt, gave a warning toot on his horn.
I flinched, and Ferocious bolted. Right out into traffic!
Behind me, JJ and Cecil screamed. In front of me, four lanes of snorting cars seemed to chase Ferocious down the blacktop. My heart jumped to my throat, and I watched in horror as he dodged and bobbed, almost like my brother racing from the Merrimac football team on the night of the Big Game!
But unlike that night, I now had a chance to make a difference.
My inner other suddenly seemed to grab hold of the steering wheel in my brain. With my cape flying and my silver sneakers flashing, I dashed onto the blacktop. Frantically I waved my arms and screamed, “Stop! Stop!”
Traffic weaved around me, honking and screeching. Ferocious sped ahead until he reached the concrete barrier in the middle of the freeway, where he made a split-second hairpin turn, zipped between my legs and ran almost all the way back to where we began. I whirled and went after him.
Back and forth we sprinted as trucks and vans and cars whizzed dangerously close. This is insane! I thought as I ran for my life. Is this what it’s like for Chris in a football game?
From the roadside, JJ was screaming, “Watch out! Watch out!!” while Cecil kept hooting, “Way to go, Captain Nobody!”
Once cars passed by me, they sped off down the highway. But as more drivers began to pump their brakes, the traffic coming at me and Ferocious began to slow down, and it backed up until, finally, all four lanes of traffic came to a stop. Ferocious and I had the freeway to ourselves.
He zigged and I zagged as the angry drivers leaned on their horns. The noise only made Ferocious more jumpy, and I kept tripping over myself as I darted back and forth, trying to catch up to him.
Just then a huge shadow passed over us.
Two massive wings suddenly blocked out the sun. At first I thought a humongous hawk had spotted Ferocious dashing around on the freeway and was swooping in to gobble him down f
or supper. But then I heard an engine sputtering.
I looked up and wilted in horror. A small airplane, coughing smoke from its engine, was headed straight for us, flying so low that its tires were practically rolling across the roofs of the stopped cars!
Without thinking, I dropped to the pavement and watched the belly of the plane as it passed overhead. I guess the angry drivers saw it, too, because their honking stopped. In the eerie quiet that followed, we could all hear the high-pitched squeal as the plane’s tires hit the wide-open freeway up ahead. Its engine continued to belch black clouds of smoke as it taxied. Finally, way down the road, it came to a stop.
You could have heard a pin drop.
I looked behind me. Through their windshields, I saw the faces of all those drivers who, only moments before, had been cursing me and shaking their fists. Now they stared back with their mouths hanging open.
Then I looked down and saw the most amazing sight of all.
At my ankle sat Ferocious, also gazing in stunned fascination at the plane in the distance. I didn’t hesitate. I reached down, scooped him up, and dashed for the roadside. As I blew by Cecil and JJ, I screamed, “I’ll get you for this!”
18
IN WHICH I LEARN AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH
We all wanted to stay and watch what happened next, but as a chorus of police sirens screamed closer and closer, Ferocious started scratching and nibbling at my hands. And once JJ reminded us how we’d thrown our backpacks and stuff all over the neighborhood, we reluctantly left.
First we ran back to find Ferocious’s cage and put him in it. Then we all went back to my house, where we collapsed in the living room, still trembling from our terrifying adventure.
After a long, glassy-eyed silence, Cecil picked up the remote and turned on the TV, just as the five o’clock news was starting. Across the top of the screen, a red banner scrolled the words “Breaking News! Airplane Tragedy Averted!”
“What?” we all shouted in unison.
The newsman behind his desk was in the middle of announcing: “. . . and police are now saying that the freeway will be tied up for at least three more hours. For more on this amazing story, we take you to Mary Myron out on the Westside Highway. Mary?”
The picture switched to a shot of the newswoman—the same one who had reported from Sullivan’s Jewelry Store the day before—standing in front of the plane that had almost lopped off my head. We all listened openmouthed as Mary Myron described the incident.
“A small passenger plane developed crippling engine trouble in the skies over Appleton this afternoon,” she said. “As the pilot desperately searched for an unpopulated place to land, he spotted a stretch of freeway unexpectedly—some might even say, miraculously—cleared of cars.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes!” the plane’s pilot said, almost in tears. “It was like Moses parting the Red Sea, the way the lanes just opened up.”
“We’re famous! We’re famous!” Cecil whooped.
“Cecil, please!” JJ shushed him. “I want to hear this.”
“What—or who—brought traffic on the normally bustling Westside Highway to a standstill this afternoon?” Mary Myron continued. “Motorists who are bottled up in this massive traffic jam have some fascinating explanations.”
“Some little bozo was out there, waving his arms and dancing around like he was trying to bring on the rain,” said a red-faced bald man. “And you wouldn’t believe the tribal costume he had on!”
I looked down at my rumpled clothes.
“He seemed to be chasing something,” said a woman holding a baby on her shoulder, “but, from my car, I couldn’t see what it was. I just assumed he was an escaped mental patient.”
I winced.
“I don’t care who that punk was or how many airplanes he saved,” a tattooed truck driver was fuming, while behind him his rig sat immobilized in the tie-up. “If I get my hands on his neck, I’m gonna snap it.”
I gulped.
The camera returned to Mary Myron. “Depending on who you speak to, the character who stopped traffic on the Westside Highway this afternoon is either a villain or a hero. Either way, the Appleton Police are very anxious to speak to him.”
“That’s twice!” JJ blurted. “Twice in two days you’ve been the lead story on the news.”
“But you gotta get your picture on TV and in the papers, or else what’s the use?” Cecil asked.
“He’s right,” JJ agreed. “Yesterday, the jewelry store cameras completely missed you, and today we left the scene too soon.”
“Okay, here’s what we’ve got to do.” Cecil started to pace around the living room. “We go back to the highway and introduce that TV lady to Captain Nobody. Then she’ll interview you, and you’ll talk about the Captain and his trusty sidekicks, and JJ and I will be standing by, so we can—”
“It’s over,” I said softly.
They both gasped. “What did you say?” asked JJ.
“You heard the TV. The police want me for questioning. People want to wring my neck, or they think I’m a mental patient. And maybe they’re right.” I tugged at my costume. “These clothes make me do crazy things.”
“Not ‘crazy’!” Cecil held up a finger of correction. “Heroic.”
“Heroic, my foot,” I scoffed. “I could’ve gotten shot yesterday . . .”
“But instead you stopped a robbery,” JJ interjected.
“. . . and today I missed getting run over about a hundred times.”
“While you rescued people,” Cecil said.
“And Ferocious,” JJ added.
“My mom and dad are sick with worry, and what am I doing? Wearing a Halloween costume and pretending I can save the world, when I can’t even . . .” I sighed. “I can’t even save my own brother.”
And, with that, I pulled off the mask, revealing my face for the first time that week.
“No, put it back on!” JJ wailed.
“You can’t hang up your cape already!” Cecil cried.
“Sorry, guys.” I shook my head sadly. “Captain Nobody is Captain no more.”
After Cecil and JJ left, I looked at the clock and groaned. It was too late to catch the bus that would get me to Chris’s hospital before visiting hours were over. Besides, I had a ferret to babysit. I trudged upstairs, feeling worse than I had all week.
In my bedroom, I took off the clothes I’d been wearing for the last four days. I studied the brightly colored garments in my hands and shook my head, bewildered that these few scraps of fabric had caused such bizarre behavior. Such insane daring! Such stupendous, amazing feelings of . . .
Stop!
It’s over.
I balled up the clothes and stuffed them into a dresser drawer before I could be tempted to ever wear them again.
Around dinnertime, Dad called from the hospital.
“How’s it going, Captain Nobody?” he asked.
“Actually, Dad,” I said, “I think Captain Nobody’s going back into a drawer.”
“Oh,” he answered. “If you say so.” He sounded relieved, but we didn’t talk about it anymore. Instead, he told me that he and Mom would be hanging out at the hospital, and could I make my own dinner?
“No prob,” I assured him. This would have been the perfect time to ask him if what I’d read about Chris in the newspaper was true. But I was afraid to hear the answer to that question.
“And if I’m not home by the time you’re in bed,” Dad was wrapping up, “I’ll catch you in the morning.”
“Okay.” I tried to sound cheerful. Before he could hang up, I blurted, “And Dad?”
“Yeah?” he answered.
“Tell Chris ‘hi’ for me.”
Dad cleared his throat and snuffled before he said, “I’ll do that, kiddo.” And then he added a quiet “G’night, Newt.”
I stood looking at the phone for a long time.
I wasn’t hungry myself, but I fed Ferocious from a can of cat food that Darryl Peeps and Colby Bryn had given
me. When he was done, I carried his cage upstairs and let him loose on the floor of my bedroom. He didn’t show any interest in exploring, though. Instead, he jumped into my lap and shivered.
“I know,” I murmured, stroking his long, slinky back. “That was pretty scary, huh?”
I could’ve sworn he nodded.
That night I dreamed I was back on the freeway, desperately dodging cars as I had done that afternoon, except that now every vehicle zooming toward me was painted either orange and green . . . or red and white.
Weird, I said to myself. Those are Fillmore’s and Merrimac’s colors. As soon as I made that realization, the cars’ front hoods morphed into shiny plastic helmets, the cars’ bodies became football players, and once again, my dream was a replay of the Big Tackle.
This time, though, everything was in slow motion. As Chris sailed into the end zone, behind him I could see all the players’ faces through their face masks as they tumbled after him: Merrimac tacklers followed by Fillmore linemen, pulling each other down and slowly collapsing. And yet I could still see Chris’s helmet, sticking out in front of the mountain of bodies that was piling on top of him.
Suddenly, soaring over the heap, here came . . . Darryl Peeps?
How’d he get downfield? Didn’t he get tackled on the twenty-yard line? Apparently he had picked himself up and continued running, because here he was, flying up, up, up over the stack of bodies and then plunging down, down, down . . .
. . . until his helmet—whomp!—met my brother’s.
“DARRYL PEEPS?” I shouted, and the next thing I knew, I was wide awake and breathing hard. From the floor next to my bed, Ferocious squeaked in his cage. I looked down to find him staring, as if demanding an explanation for my outburst.
“It wasn’t Reggie Ratner,” I whispered. “I remember now. I saw it happen. Darryl Peeps put Chris in a coma!”
19
IN WHICH REGGIE RATNER DECIDES TO END IT ALL
For the rest of the night I tossed and turned, and when I finally stumbled down to breakfast in my blue jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, I found Mom puttering around the kitchen. She looked like she hadn’t slept well either.
Captain Nobody Page 9
