For Rick and Louie and my dad
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
SNEAK PEEK
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO AVAILABLE
COPYRIGHT
My best friend, Greg Troutman, was late for band practice, and our friend Julie Kobayashi wasn’t happy about it. I wasn’t, either — Greg seemed to be running late a lot lately — but at least I wasn’t storming around and yelling about it like Julie. For somebody so quiet at school, she sure could get loud sometimes.
“He better have been abducted by aliens!” she fumed. “Or chased by clowns.” She hit a couple of minor chords on her electric keyboard when she said that — Dunh, dunh DUNNNNH!
“Why clowns?” I asked.
“Oh, please, Anderson,” she said, rolling her eyes — something else she did really well when she was exasperated with Greg or me. “As if there’s anything worse. Or scarier.”
“He probably had to do chores after school,” I suggested.
Julie glared at me. “That’s no excuse.”
It occurred to me that maybe there was something — or somebody — scarier than clowns, but I didn’t say that out loud.
Julie stomped around our practice room for another minute, just to make sure I totally got how annoyed she was. We were in the basement of my uncle Dex’s junk shop (the Kitchen Sink), of course, where we always practiced, and where, ever since we started our band, the Ghosts of War, we’d been stumbling into ghost mysteries involving this trunk full of old war artifacts. After our most recent ghost episode, I had shoved it deep in a corner of the practice room and piled stuff on top so I wouldn’t have to look at it, or be tempted to open it and have another mystery spill out that we’d also have to solve.
We’d already had encounters with two ghosts — one from World War II and the other from the Vietnam War. They turned out to be nice, and we were able to help them in the end, but, man, were we ever stressed out and exhausted afterward. I wrote all about those mysteries in a couple of notebooks I kept hidden under my mattress at home that nobody will ever read except Julie and Greg. I even gave them titles. The first one I called “The Secret of Midway” and the second was “Lost at Khe Sanh.”
But all that detective work cut into our band practice time, and the best we’d been able to do in two tries in the monthly open mic night battle of the bands was come in next to last. So I kind of understood why Julie was annoyed right now.
She was still fuming and I was still trying to stay out of her way when the door to our practice room suddenly opened and there was Greg, staggering into the door frame, holding his hand against the side of his head. His red hair was all wild on one side and matted on the other, and when he pulled his hand away from the matted side there was blood. A lot of blood!
“Greg!” I shouted, jumping over my amplifier and guitar to get to him before he fainted, or fell, or both.
Julie came flying over to us as well. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “What happened?”
“Uh, maybe we could first stop the bleeding?” Greg said.
I looked around the room but couldn’t see anything to use, so I pulled off my shirt.
“What are you doing?” Julie barked. “Put your shirt back on, Anderson.”
“Well, what else can I use?” I barked back.
“Go ask your uncle,” she said.
Greg shook his head, keeping his hand pressed over the bloody wound. “He must have stepped out. He wasn’t at the front desk when I came in.”
Then he said, “Check the trunk. I’m pretty sure I saw a medic’s kit in there the last time it was open.”
“A medic’s kit?” I repeated, sort of asking and sort of stalling, so I could think up an excuse not to check. I did not want to go back into that trunk and risk starting up another ghost of war mystery.
“Just go check!” Julie ordered. “He’s bleeding all over the place. Look, it’s on his shirt and everything.”
“Okay,” I grumbled. “You know, head wounds bleed a lot because the veins or whatever are so close to the skin, but they’re usually not that serious. I read that somewhere.”
“Go!” Julie ordered again.
It took me a couple of minutes to drag boxes and stuff off the trunk, but once again — just like the last two times this happened — the trunk seemed to practically open by itself. And sure enough, there, right on top, was a canvas army medic’s pouch. I hesitated, then grabbed it and opened it and rifled through scissors and vials and capped syringes and pill bottles and stuff until I found what seemed to be gauze packages, and a larger package that said “tourniquet.” I grabbed both and rushed back over to Julie and Greg, tearing open the packages as I went.
“Smells kind of musty,” Julie said as I handed her the gauze. She wrinkled her nose but pressed it against Greg’s wound. I offered her the tourniquet, too, but she just shoved it away.
“We don’t need that, Anderson. We need some tape, to tape this on.”
So I went back for the medical kit — there were rolls of surgical tape — and we finished bandaging Greg.
“Should we call 911?” I asked.
“I guess,” Julie said, though she didn’t sound convinced.
“What?” I asked. “You don’t think we should?”
“Well, we should see how serious it is first,” she said. “And you know what happened the last time we called 911.”
Of course I did — we all did. It was when I found a hand grenade in the trunk a month earlier, which I wrote all about in “Lost at Khe Sanh.” The bomb squad had to detonate it. Uncle Dex said we couldn’t keep practicing at the Kitchen Sink if we ever did anything like that again.
Greg spoke up. “Don’t call 911. I’m okay. I think.”
He sat up straighter.
“Are you sure?” I asked, feeling guilty that we were even debating this. Of course we should call 911.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”
“Maybe we should call your dad, then?” I suggested.
“No, it’s okay,” Greg replied. “I just got a little freaked out.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” Julie said, sounding so sympathetic it was almost hard to remember how annoyed she had been earlier at the missing Greg.
“All that blood,” I added.
“So what happened anyway?” Julie asked. “Did you wreck your bike?”
“Yeah, was it a bike wreck?” I echoed Julie. “Or did you have a run-in with a clown?”
Julie gave me a very dirty look.
“Neither one,” Greg said, taking it all in stride, as if a guy with a bloody head got asked every day if he’d gotten in a clown fight.
“Well, what, then?” Julie asked — or demanded.
Greg got a goofy expression on his face, and I could tell he was embarrassed.
“It was a chicken,” he admitted.
“A chicken?” I repeated. “What about a chicken?”
“It flew into my head.”
“A chicken?” I said again. “Flew into your head?”
Greg nodded. Julie frowned. “Ch
ickens don’t fly,” she said.
I was happy to correct her. “Actually, they do, Julie. Short distances. That’s just a myth that they can’t fly at all.”
She gave me the stink eye and I stopped smiling.
“Well, it didn’t exactly fly on its own,” Greg said. “And it wasn’t exactly the kind of chicken you guys are thinking it was.”
“What kind was it, then?” Julie demanded.
Greg grinned, but then he winced. I guess grinning hurt his head. He held something up I hadn’t realized he had been holding all this time in his non-bloody hand. It was a rubber chicken.
“Are you serious?” Julie asked.
“Pretty crazy, huh?” Greg said. “I was just minding my own business, riding my bike over here past that old Masonic cemetery, when I saw something out of the corner of my eye, flying right at me, but before I could duck, it hit me and I crashed my bike.”
“So somebody threw it at you?” I said. “Somebody in the cemetery.”
“A ghost,” Julie said.
Greg and I looked at her to see if she was kidding. It wasn’t like we needed any convincing that ghosts were real. But why would someone throw a rubber chicken at Greg — or at anybody?
Julie laughed. “Oh my gosh, you two are so gullible! I was just kidding.”
“Not funny,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”
Greg shrugged. “I thought it was kind of funny,” he said. “In an understated sort of way.” That was an expression he’d picked up from Julie, who used a lot of adult expressions that most kids didn’t quite understand, especially kids in middle school like us.
“Do you remember anything else?” I asked.
“Not really,” Greg said. “Just, you know, picking up the rubber chicken, and my bike, and then coming over here. A couple of people saw me and must have seen all the blood because they got these funny looks on their faces. One guy asked if I needed any help. I just waved the chicken and said I was okay. Guess I was a little woozier than I realized.”
He paused, before adding, “Oh wait. There was this loud pop sound just before the chicken hit me. That was over in the cemetery, too.”
“What do you think it was?” Julie asked.
Greg didn’t get a chance to answer, though, because a voice behind us, from the direction of the trunk in the corner of the practice room, interrupted.
“There’s sulfa powder in my kit,” it said. “You should pour some over the boy’s wound, make sure it doesn’t get infected until we can get him off the battlefield. And keep pressure on the wound.”
We all turned and stared. It was obviously another ghost — and obviously a soldier — but no matter how many times these ghosts showed up, it was impossible not to be shocked.
The new ghost was wearing tattered green army fatigues, his face mostly blackened from what looked like dirt and smoke. He had a Red Cross armband on — red cross with a white square — and he was looking around the room as if expecting to see, well, I didn’t know what. Just something else. Or somewhere else.
“No stretcher?” the man asked.
I shook my head and said, “No, sir.”
“All right, then,” the man said. “I guess we’ll just have to stitch him up right here.”
He had somehow crossed the room without my realizing it, and was reaching for the medical kit. Only his hand stopped short when he tried to pick it up, as if it was too heavy, or as if he couldn’t quite get a grip on it, or as if it was solid and he wasn’t.
“This is strange,” he said, shaking his head.
And then he vanished.
“Wait!” I yelled, jumping to my feet, holding out the pouch, as if he might want to take it. “Come back!”
Greg was standing next to me. “Wasn’t he supposed to, you know, fade out? That’s what the other ghosts did. They didn’t just suddenly disappear like that.”
“Well, they’re all different, aren’t they?” said Julie. “Just like people. And ghosts are people, too.”
“Uh, not exactly,” I said.
“Of course they are,” Greg said, probably agreeing with Julie because it was easier than disagreeing with Julie, who had to be right about everything — and usually was.
“Well, whatever,” I said. “But shouldn’t we be focusing on bloody Greg here?”
Bloody Greg lifted the gauze from his forehead. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.
We didn’t have a chance to inspect further just then because we heard footsteps coming down the stairs from the store above us.
This time it was Uncle Dex.
“What in the world is going on?” he demanded. “There’s a bike lying on the sidewalk at the front door, and blood on the front doorknob!”
Greg waved the gauze. “Sorry,” he said. “That was me. I got hit by a rubber chicken.”
“Whoa!” Uncle Dex said, pulling off his baseball cap and kneeling. “You okay? Let me take a look.”
He quickly determined that the bleeding had, in fact, stopped, then he went upstairs for his own first aid kit, which took him a while to find. He had more gauze, though, and alcohol for cleaning the wound, and when he came back down, he went to work on Greg, and in a minute had him all cleaned off and a bandage taped to Greg’s forehead.
“Flesh wound,” he announced. “Not going to need stitches.”
“That’s not what the ghost said,” I muttered to Julie.
“What’s that?” Uncle Dex asked.
“Um, nothing,” I said. “Just, you know, thanks for coming to the rescue.”
Uncle Dex laughed. “Nothing much to rescue. Just a cleanup operation. Not sure I can do anything about this shirt, though.”
Greg shrugged. “That’s okay.”
“Good,” Uncle Dex said. “Now tell me about this rubber chicken that attacked you. Could you identify him in a police lineup?”
Greg held up the bird. “No need for that. Got him right here.” He told Uncle Dex what he’d already told Julie and me — about the Masonic cemetery, and the pop, and getting hit, and the rest.
“Hmm,” Uncle Dex said. “Sounds like a sneak attack. You kids have any enemies who would pull a prank like that?”
We all looked at one another. Did we have any enemies? Of course we had enemies. This eighth grader named Belman, and his friends, who were always trying to bully us at school, and who had a band, too, and always won the all-ages open mic competitions, while we just mostly stunk.
“Not really,” Julie said, responding to Uncle Dex’s question about our enemies. I could tell by the look on Julie’s face that if Belman was responsible for the rubber chicken attack, she was determined we would take care of him ourselves.
“Okay,” Uncle Dex said. “Well, probably just a random thing, then. I’ll make some calls when I go back upstairs, just to be on the safe side. See if my friend down at the police station has heard about anybody else getting pelted by rubber chickens or anything strange like that.”
We all thanked him, and then he left, and finally we were able to exhale and stutter and stammer about what all had just happened. It was too much, really: rubber chicken attacks, and new ghosts with medical kits, and appearances and disappearances so sudden that we all practically had whiplash.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Greg asked. He was talking about the ghost, not Uncle Dex.
“Yeah,” I said. “Probably. The other ones came to my house first. You remember. Just showed up in my room. So maybe it will be the same with this one. Even though he came here first, and saw all of us and not just me.”
“They are all different,” Julie reminded us. “Like I said before.”
“I guess so,” I said. “But, meanwhile, why don’t we look over this medical kit to see if there are any clues? If he’s like the other ghosts, he’s not going to know who he is, or where he’s from, or what happened to him.”
“Yeah,” Greg said. “Another missing in action.”
“Perhaps we should show your uncle the medic
al kit,” Julie suggested. “Since he knows so much about antiques, and about old military items. He might be able to tell us what war it’s from, anyway. And what branch of the service. Also, I’m not sure we should go rummaging around inside there by ourselves, because we have no idea what might be in there.”
“You mean like another hand grenade?” Greg asked eagerly.
“She means like those hypodermic needles we already saw,” I said. “And whatever’s in those medicine bottles. And whatever that is the ghost mentioned — the sulfur.”
“He said sulfa, not sulfur,” Greg said. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Maybe they’re the same thing,” I responded. “Maybe he has some kind of accent. You know, drops his r’s.”
“Let’s just go ask your uncle about it,” Julie said again, and this time we all agreed.
“World War II vintage, definitely,” Uncle Dex said as soon as we handed him the kit upstairs. “And army.” He carefully pulled all the items out and laid them in a row on the counter naming them as he went: adhesive plaster, iodine swabs, blunt forceps, Mercurochrome, ammonia inhalants, adhesive compresses, aspirin, safety pin cards, burn ointment, a thermometer, those sulfa packets the ghost mentioned. There were also things called litter straps, and an Emergency Medical Tag book with strings attached to detachable tags and places to record identification, branch of service, diagnosis, and treatment. Uncle Dex told us what most of this stuff was, and he said the strings were to tie the medical tags to the buttons on wounded soldiers’ uniforms on the battlefield.
As usual, there weren’t any other customers in the Kitchen Sink. Late Tuesday afternoon in downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia, isn’t exactly the liveliest place on the planet, and even less so in the dozen junk shops — I mean, antique stores — on Caroline and Sophia Streets, including my uncle’s.
“You have most everything you’d need here if you were an army medic,” Uncle Dex concluded.
AWOL in North Africa Page 1
