The No-Good Nine

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  He is incapable of having a conversation that is not about him and believes he is going to become a movie star.

  He is completely delusional. I wonder where and when I can leave him behind.

  As we arrive in Quebec City he tells me that the No-Good Nine are going to the Ritz. I fear that I have made a grave mistake trusting him. How could a group of children afford the world-famous Ritz-Carlton?

  As we arrive, my fears are confirmed. I am told that no children without an adult are checked in.

  But in questioning employees, I talk to a clerk who says that a group of children did come the night before, but there was no space at the hotel. He says that one of them was very obnoxious.

  GLORIOUS: “That had to be the Brat! Oh, he’s my BEST friend!”

  Further investigation reveals that they had arrived and departed with a girl well known to hotel employees. She lives by the docks, and her mother is some sort of baker. The French they speak here is difficult to comprehend so I am unable to exactly understand who this person is, but the hotel clerk is able to give me her address.

  The domicile we arrive at appears to be in poor condition. We know it is the correct house because out front there is a truck marked

  MUMMY RUMMY’S

  HOME-BAKED YUMMIES

  For us, it was just as well we had no idea that my archenemy and the Vainglorious were chasing us, let alone that they had made it to Mummy’s. After all, we had enough to worry about as it was. In fact, if we had known what was waiting for us in our next episode, we would never have followed the Thief.

  At least, one of us wouldn’t have.

  Because, you see, something really bad is going to happen to someone. Something GRUESOME.

  If you have the stomach for it, read on! And you’ll find out how a member of the No-Good Nine came to look the way he—or she—does.

  Now maybe stop and use the bathroom, or go get a glass of water. You’ll need it!

  EPISODE FOUR:

  MUSH!

  22. OFF TO THE RACES

  The Thief parked the truck in front of a rough wooden sign that read

  BAWDY CLAUDE’S TRADING POST

  Below, smaller signs read

  Siberia → 3,421 mi

  476 mi ← Boondocks

  Middle of Nowhere → 2 mi

  “Uncle Claude’s idea of a joke,” the Thief said, letting us out of the back of the truck.

  It didn’t seem like much of a joke. Here was as close to nowhere as I’d ever been.

  Inside, we found Bawdy Claude himself, all burly, bearded, and bearlike. The only parts of his face not covered by hair were his eyes, nose, and lips.

  He and the Thief kissed each other on the cheeks, which was weird. At first they were all friendly, but as they talked, the conversation turned to arguing and swearing. It was all in French, which I was starting to understand. The swear words, anyway. Tabarnouche seemed to be the favorite.

  They must have settled on a price, because the arguing stopped and they were spitting in their hands and shaking on it.

  Following Claude out the back, the Thief explained that she’d traded the truck and booze for two teams of dogs, a pair of sleds, eight fur coats, and a dozen cases of canned food, as well as a few other supplies, like matches. Behind the store, we walked into the kennel to meet our dogs.

  “Puppies!” Goody-Two-Shoes said.

  “Zese are not puppies!” Claude said, his accent as thick as maple syrup. “Zese are sled dogs! Zey are professional work animals!”

  “They’re licking me!” Goody said. She got swallowed up in a huddle of fur and wagging tails.

  The only one not petting the dogs was the Hooligan. Every time a dog barked, he jumped like a firecracker had landed at his feet.

  “Is the big tough gang member afraid of the little puppies?” the Cruel said.

  “Haw!” the Rude laughed. The Hooligan slugged him in the shoulder.

  Claude harnessed the dogs to the sleds, telling us how to do it as he went.

  “I know how to work a dogsled, Claude,” the Thief said, taking a seat in one. “Tabarnouche, I can beat you in a race!”

  Claude shot her a dirty look and said the instructions weren’t for her, they were for us. When he was done, he asked who wanted to drive the other team.

  “Me! Me!” the Brat said.

  “No, me!” the Cruel said.

  The dogs just sat there.

  “What are the two of you, five years old?” Goody-Two-Shoes said. “Take turns!”

  The Cruel did not like to be ordered around. She shot Goody-Two-Shoes her frostiest look, but Goody didn’t even blink. One thing was for sure—they weren’t going to be on the same team!

  I knew whose team I wanted to be on, though, so I quick hopped onto the Thief’s sled right up front next to her. Goody-Two-Shoes and the Know-It-All fast climbed in back with the supplies, which meant that the Hooligan and the Rude got stuck in the other sled with the Cruel and the Brat, now arguing over who would lead the team first. While they did, the Thief gave the signal and the dogs started pulling.

  “Mush! Mush! Mush!” she cried.

  This was soooo aces!

  “We need to turn slightly to the north-northeast,” the Know-It-All called from the back, consulting his compass. “According to my estimation, we will make it to the lighthouse in Black Tickle in 315 hours, which is to say 13.25 days, based on an average speed of 82.5 miles per day.”

  Did he always have to ruin everything with math?

  Our sled glided along gracefully, its runners laying lines in the snow like railroad tracks, while the other sled jerked around in fits and spits, and left a trail that just looked broken.

  The Brat and the Cruel were terrible at dogsledding.

  “You’re doing it all wrong!”

  “No, you are!”

  As they argued and flailed, the Thief kept having to stop to let them catch up.

  At last, the Cruel got the dogs going forward, and the Thief let them pass us.

  From the back of their sled, the Hooligan let out a “Woo-hoo!” while the Rude blew us a raspberry.

  “Slowpokes!”

  The Thief followed but hung back.

  “Don’t you want to pass them?” I said.

  She smiled. “Not yet.”

  “It’s not a race, you know!” Goody-Two-Shoes called to them.

  “Well, let’s make it a race!” the Hooligan yelled back.

  “Yeah!” the Rude hollered.

  “Oh, you want a race?” the Thief called, pretending to be surprised. “Yes, we can have a race!”

  So we did.

  But it wasn’t even fair. It was like our team was an Olympic sprinter, and their team was some klutzy kid with his shoelaces tied together.

  “We’ve lost sight of them!” Goody said.

  The Thief halted the team and we waited for them to catch up.

  “Do you want to try again?” she asked smirkily.

  “Yes!” the Brat said. “But this time I mush!”

  But it didn’t matter. Our team won again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And

  again.

  “I think you were a little closer that time!” the Thief called as they approached. “We could almost hear you losing!”

  The Brat got off the sled and threw his hat down, having one of his ruby-red tantrums.

  “You call that mushing? You have no clue what you’re doing!” the Cruel said, getting off the sled to yell at him. “I’m driving this time!”

  “Aw, the both a y’uns stink at this!” the Hooligan said. “Let someone else have a try!”

  The Rude didn’t need to be told twice.

  The moment he got in the driver’s seat, he was ten times bet
ter than either the Cruel or the Brat. The dogs immediately responded to his voice and started pulling straight ahead.

  “This is easy!” the Rude said. “It’s just like horses!”

  “Hey, wait up!” the Brat called, suddenly realizing that he and the Cruel were getting left behind. They had to run as hard as they could to catch up and hop-fall-tumble into the back.

  They caught up to our sled, and the race was ON!

  And this time the winner wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  “On MAYHEM, on MONSTER! On THRASHER, on BLITZKRIEG!” the Rude yelled.

  I have to admit, I was jealous. Those were swell names. (Goody had named ours Buster and Fluffy and Cuddles and Icy-Paws.) The dogs must’ve liked them too, because they were going faster.

  This time, the race lasted a long time. We were neck and neck, our team nudging ahead, then the Rude’s, then ours again. But our dogs started to fade, and the Thief quit the race.

  “We won!” the Hooligan said, slapping the Rude on the back. “Way to go, twerp!”

  “Finally!” the Thief said. “A worthy opponent!”

  The Cruel and the Brat just sulked.

  The Know-It-All, meanwhile, had no idea a race had even been had. He was too busy measuring the sun with a sextant.

  “We should make camp,” he said, checking his results against his pocket watch and jotting down numbers in his notebook.“With the declination of the sun, I calculate dusk will come in forty-two minutes.”

  Instead of making a shelter, however, we tore into the cases of canned food. We were starving! The Rude opened a can of peas and drank them.

  The food warmed up our insides, but the problem was the outside. The sun was dropping as fast as a basketball through a hoop, and the temperature plummeted right along with it.

  It was freezing.

  Actually, it was way below freezing.

  And then it started to snow.

  This was not good.

  23. CAMPFIRE TALES

  If it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the only way this—a bunch of idiot kids flinging themselves headlong into the subarctic wilderness in the middle of winter—could end was with all of us freezing to death, it really should’ve occurred to me now.

  Our only hope of making it through the night out here was the Thief. She claimed to have had a half-Inuit second cousin she once lived with who taught her how to survive worse weather than this.

  Then she built the snow cave.

  “Are you sure that’s what it’s supposed to look like?” I said.

  “I think it’s pretty good!” the Thief said.

  But it really wasn’t.

  “According to my manuals,” the Know-It-All said, “a properly built snow shelter—”

  “Aw shuddup!” the Hooligan said. “You and your books! You can’t even read a boat schedule!”

  “Are you guys ever going to stop bringing that up?” the Know-It-All said.

  “No!” the Brat, the Rude, and the Hooligan said in unison.

  It was really dark now.

  And I was really cold.

  The kind of cold I had been feeling at the end of last chapter was nothing compared to the kind of cold I felt right now.

  “I’ll make the fire,” the Rude said. “Where’s the wood?” He looked to the Thief.

  “What wood?” she said. “We couldn’t bring wood! How would the dogs be able to pull wood?”

  “So how are we going to make a fire?”

  The Thief shook her head. “No fire.”

  “NO fire?”

  And now it occurred to me that we were a bunch of idiot kids about to freeze to death.

  “Fire! Fire! We need fiiiiiire!” the Rude said, his teeth chattering.

  “Unless you see any chairs or floorboards around,” the Cruel said, “tough it out.”

  “But we do have something!” Goody-Two-Shoes said, reaching into her pocket. She had what was in all of our pockets. “Coal!”

  Right! The coal Santa had left us! I took my lump out of my pocket, and so did everyone else. It wound up we had all brung it.

  Goody passed around a tin can for us to put the coal in, and the Know-It-All lit it.

  This was a momentous moment! The burning of the Christmas coal! Something important had to be said. Something to mark its place forever in time. I opened my mouth and

  cough cough

  almost hacked up a lung. The coal smoke was blowing right in my face.

  This stuff was awful!

  We all warmed ourselves as best we could without being downwind.

  “Hey, quit hoggin’ all the heat!” the Hooligan said, trying to push the Rude out of the way.

  But the Rude didn’t pay any attention.

  “Next year, I’m gonna send Santa my Christmas list and I’m only gonna put one thing on it,” he said. “Coal! That’ll really blow the old elf’s mind. He’ll have to give me something else, or he’ll be giving me exactly what I ask for.”

  “Yeah!” the Hooligan said. “Let’s all do that. We write that we only want coal so’s we can stay warm, and beg him please, please don’t give us no toys! Then he’ll leave us some fer sure!”

  “I’m sure Santa will fall for that plan,” the Cruel said. “Outwitted by Tweedledum and Tweedledummer.”

  “Well, we’ll be playing with Santa’s t-t-toys sooner than I had calculated,” the Know-It-All said. “We made such good time today, I’m revising my estimate down to only 10.37 days to reach Black Tickle. And once we get to the magical lighthouse, it shouldn’t take any t-t-time at all before we are whisked to the North Pole!”

  “What’s it going to be like?” Goody said. “Santa’s workshop.”

  The Know-It-All got all know-it-all-y, telling us exactly what it was going to be like. How all the elves lived in gingerbread cottages and loved their work, and how Santa was so kind to them and made sure they never worked too hard. “Oh, and the toys!” he went on. “They make every kind of toy in the world. Millions of them!”

  The coal was nearly burned out, and it started getting cold again.

  “Forget Santa’s. We’re never gonna make it anywhere if we don’t figure out some way to stay warm,” the Brat said.

  “All we need to keep us warm is right over there,” the Thief said. She was pointing toward the dogs, all huddled up in one mass of fur and tails. “Each one is like a warm stove. We either have to sleep on top of them, or each other.”

  “I’ll take one of these mutts over one of you any day,” the Cruel said, getting up.

  Me, I was used to sleeping between a bunch of sweaty, smelly brothers and sisters, so it was downright nice to cozy up between a couple of fuzzy dogs. And they were warm!

  Finally, we were on our way! It felt pretty swell.

  Of course, we would have felt a lot less swell if we had known what had been happening back in a certain rickety shack in Quebec.

  * * *

  • • •

  Meanwhile . . .

  If you remember, we last left the Truant Officer and the Vainglorious as they arrived at the shack of Mummy Rummy.

  I get a heart attack just thinking about that place!

  So I’ll let my archenemy tell you what happened:

  We knock on the front door and are met by a woman who identifies herself as Mummy Rummy.

  Mrs. Rummy seems unhappy to be disturbed.

  When I say why we are here, however, she becomes interested. Then distressed.

  It happens that her own daughter, Pearl, is now a runaway. The child brought the No-Good Nine to her house yesterday and Mrs. Rummy gave them food and shelter. This morning, Mrs. Rummy helped the American children in their travels by driving them outside of the city, only to return home to discover that her own daughter was gone. She fears that Pearl has gone off to join the
m.

  Mrs. Rummy begins crying at the thought that the children are all alone in the snowy wilderness.

  Mummy was pretty good at that fake crying thing—at faking out everyone.

  The real story was that Mummy had come home from leaving us for dead to find that the Thief had escaped and stolen one of her trucks, as well as something else. (I’d tell you what it was, but that would ruin a surprise.) Mummy was boiling mad, and she and the Brothers Jack were just about to go in search of her when my nemesis and the Vainglorious showed up at her door.

  It had occurred to Mummy that maybe Pearl had gone to find us, but she didn’t know exactly where we were going. The Vainglorious, however, said he did.

  “To the lighthouse at . . . DARK HUMOR!” he said. “On the coast of . . . GOLDEN RETRIEVER!”

  Mummy wondered if both the Vainglorious and the Truant Officer weren’t total morons. She decided to take them along to hunt for us anyway, but she’d never let either of them realize the truth: She wanted the Thief back for one reason and one reason only. To teach that ungrateful wretch a lesson!

  From my archenemy’s diary, it’s pretty clear the big dope fell for Mummy’s good-mother act hook, line, and sinker. What a chump!

  (Yeah, I know we fell for it, too. But we were just a bunch of stupid kids and he was a former Russian secret agent.)

  As for what the Vainglorious thought of Mummy, I have no idea. Other than that he probably wasn’t thinking at all.

  24. WE WERE NOT ALONE

  This dog feels soooo warm and cozy, I thought as I slowly began to wake up. I just have to give it a hug!

  The mutt sure did smell bad though—even for a dog.

  I opened my eyes. I wasn’t hugging a dog.

  I was hugging the Rude.

  “Gross!” I said, pushing him away. “Get off of me!”

  And that’s when I heard it. People talking outside, in a language I didn’t understand.

  And it wasn’t French.

  I peeked out of the snow shelter and saw two hooded figures. One short, one tall. The one had a long spear and the other a rifle.

  Then I realized—these were Inuit! How far north were we?