by Dan Gutman
“Where are we going now?” Coke asked glumly as they pulled out of the campground’s parking lot. “The Pencil Sharpener Museum?”
“How did you know there was a pencil sharpener museum in Ohio?” asked Mrs. McDonald.
“It was a lucky guess,” Coke said, slipping the Pez dispenser into his back pocket.
“Well, I have good news for you,” Mrs. McDonald announced. “We are not going to the Pencil Sharpener Museum. And we are not going to the Paperweight Museum, or the National Construction Equipment Museum, or the Merry-Go-Round Museum, or the Bicycle Museum of America, or the Annie Oakley museum, or even the Cardboard Boat Museum. Personally, I would love to visit all those wonderful Ohio landmarks.”
“So where are we going?” Pep asked.
“Today we’re going someplace just for you,” Dr. McDonald told the kids. “We’re going to Cedar Point!”
“Cedar Point?” Pep asked. “What kind of museum is that?”
Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).
Click Get Directions.
In the A box, type Paulding OH.
In the B box, type Toledo OH.
Click Get Directions.
“It sounds like the name of a mental institution,” Coke remarked.
“Cedar Point happens to be the greatest amusement park in the world!” Dr. McDonald replied, grinning broadly. “And it’s in Sandusky, Ohio!”
“Really?” Pep screamed, jumping out of her seat to wrap her arms around her parents. “I love you!”
There are great amusement parks in California, of course. Six Flags. Sea World. Disneyland. But Sandusky, Ohio, is almost sacred ground for roller-coaster fanatics around the world. Its first coaster was built back in 1892. Now Cedar Point is filled with them, and they are among the tallest and fastest in the world. Both of the twins loved thrill rides, the scarier the better.
Dr. McDonald popped a piece of gum into his mouth and an AC/DC disc into the CD player. It always amazed him that one of his favorite rock bands of his youth was also loved by his children.
“Turn it up!” Coke shouted over the music. He liked his music loud. The louder the better.
Dr. McDonald followed the local roads until he reached Route 24 East, which he stayed on for a long fifty-five miles. By that time, stomachs had started growling and it was decided unanimously to stop off for lunch well before they got to Cedar Point. It’s not a good idea to ride a roller coaster on a full stomach.
Dr. McDonald pulled off the road at Toledo, where he saw a truck advertising a hot dog restaurant called Tony Packo’s. BITE THE BEST, it said on the side of the truck. He couldn’t resist.
“Holy Toledo!” Coke said as they walked into Tony Packo’s.
The walls of the restaurant were covered with plaques, each one bearing a hot dog bun that had been autographed by a famous person. Jerry Seinfeld. George W. Bush. Bing Crosby. Patti LaBelle. Clint Black. There were five hundred of them.
“This place is like a hot dog bun museum!” Mrs. McDonald said, reaching for her camera. Tony Packo’s would be perfect for Amazing but True.
They found an empty table and the waitress, an older woman, came over.
“What’ll it be, folks?” she asked.
“Hot dogs!” all four replied.
“Good choice.”
The kids walked around examining the autographed buns on the wall, but it wasn’t long before their hot dogs arrived, so they rushed back to their table. Coke was about to bite into his hot dog when he decided to put some ketchup on it. As he opened up the bun, this is what he saw burned into it:
“Oh no,” he said to himself. He quickly scanned the restaurant, then glanced over at the other buns on the table. Nobody else’s bun had weird symbols burned into it.
Without saying a word, Coke showed the bun to his sister. She raised her eyebrows.
“Memorize it,” Pep whispered in his ear.
“I already did.”
The cipher committed to memory, Coke doused the dog with ketchup and destroyed the evidence, by eating it.
Back on the road to Cedar Point after lunch, the twins huddled together in the back of the RV as Coke wrote down the symbols he had seen on his hot dog bun.
“It’s indecipherable!” he whispered.
“Every cipher is decipherable,” Pep whispered back. “That’s why they’re called ciphers. And this one, actually, is easily decipherable. It uses the Ogham alphabet.”
“The what?!”
“It was a medieval alphabet used in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales,” she said, as she began writing it out.
“How can you possibly know that?” Coke asked.
“The same way you know worthless trivia like the four things that were invented in Ohio,” she replied.
Pep finished writing out the Ogham alphabet.
“How do you decode it?” Coke asked.
“The first symbol, the two lines dropping straight down, represents the letter G,” Pep said. “See? It’s followed by an R. The next two letters are the same—E. After that is an N. So the first word is GREEN.”
“No it’s not,” Coke whispered. He had already figured out the next five letters—SBORO. “The first word is GREENSBORO.”
Together, they figured out the next five letters—LUNCH. They puzzled over that for a moment before decoding the rest of the message—COUNTER.
GREENSBORO LUNCH COUNTER
“Does that mean anything to you?” Coke whispered to his sister.
“No,” Pep replied.
“Yo, parental units!” Coke called out to the front of the RV. “If I say the words ‘Greensboro lunch counter,’ what comes to mind?”
“Greensboro, North Carolina, 1960,” Dr. McDonald replied right away. “Four African American students sat at a lunch counter where only whites were allowed to sit. It was one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement.”
“Are we going to North Carolina on this trip?” Pep whispered to her brother.
“I don’t think so,” he replied.
Coke and Pep looked at each other and shrugged.
“Why do you ask about the Greensboro lunch counter?” asked Dr. McDonald.
“Oh, we just decoded a secret message that had been burned into my hot dog bun,” Coke replied. “It said ‘Greensboro lunch counter.’”
“Very funny,” Mrs. McDonald said. “You kids have such vivid imaginations.”
Pep turned to a clean page in her notebook and started a list.
• July 3, two P.M.
• Greensboro lunch counter
Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).
Click Get Directions.
In the A box, type Toledo OH.
In the B box, type Sandusky OH.
Click Get Directions.
“Maybe we’ll get another cipher and it will all make sense,” she whispered.
It was another fifty-five miles to Sandusky, on the shores of Lake Erie. The McDonalds pulled into the Cedar Point parking lot just before noon. Coke usually took his backpack with him wherever he went, but his mother told him to leave it in the RV. She didn’t want to see it flying off a roller coaster.
While their parents waited in line to buy tickets, Coke and Pep looked around with wonder. There were seventeen roller coasters here, one of the largest collections in the world. Cedar Point also had fifteen thrill rides, a dozen water slides, parasailing, shows, music, and all the junk food you could eat. It was paradise.
This would make up for everything they had endured to get here. For the first time in a long time, thoughts of evil health teachers, psychos wearing bowler hats, Archie Clone, and Dr. Herman Warsaw vanished from their minds.
“I think this place is heaven,” Coke said in awe.
“Can we get ice cream?” Pep asked.
“Sure,” Dr. McDonald agreed, “but don’t you want to ride the roller coasters first?”
“Yeah!”
“I don’t like being upside down,” Mrs. McDonald announc
ed. “I’m going to stick with the wimpy rides.”
“I’ll hang with Mom,” said Dr. McDonald. “You kids go have fun. Keep in touch with us on your cell phones.”
If you, dear reader, have been following The Genius Files closely, you may have noticed by now that whenever the twins go off on their own without their parents, someone tries to kill them. Uncanny, isn’t it? Unfortunately, Coke and Pep have yet to notice this phenomenon. Foolishly, they waved good-bye and went off in search of thrills.
And they would find them.
The twins examined the park map to plan their amusement park strategy. If you’re going to go to an amusement park, you have to have an amusement park strategy, right?
They would avoid all the kiddie rides and wimpy rides, of course. The thrill rides and water stuff would be fun to do, but Coke and Pep decided to hold off on them. If the lines were long, they might only get to a limited number of rides during the day. Cedar Point was famous for its coasters, so they should concentrate on them first. If there was time later, they could hit the other stuff. It was a solid plan.
The lines were manageable. First they rode the Corkscrew, which turns you upside down three times. Their brains fully scrambled, they got in line for the Top Thrill Dragster, which reaches speeds of 120 miles per hour. Hearts racing, they made their way to Millennium Force, which tops out at 310 feet up in the air. They survived Mantis, where you have to stand up the whole time. They did Gemini. They did Magnum XL-200. They were dizzy with euphoria.
As they were walking down the ramp after Magnum XL-200, Coke sent a text to his mom.
this is the gr8est day of my life
thanx for giving birth to me
“I hate to bring this up,” Pep said as they headed for the next coaster, “but I have the feeling that somebody is following us.”
“What?” Coke said. “Are you kidding me? There are thousands of people here. What could they do? And if somebody was going to try something, they would have made their move by now.”
But Pep was usually right about her feelings. Coke looked around and scoped out the area. They were near another coaster, one called Disaster Transport. “Come on,” he told Pep. “Let’s duck in here.”
There was no line at Disaster Transport, and soon the twins were sitting in the little car, getting seat-belted in by a teenage girl with a nose ring. The seat in front of theirs was empty. Coke glanced behind as a precaution. Nobody was sitting in that seat either. They were safe. The car was nestled in a U-shaped trough, sort of like a bobsled in the Olympics.
“Have fun!” the girl with the nose ring said as their car started inching forward.
The twins were in total darkness almost immediately, except for two rows of white lights on the left and right walls. Then the lights disappeared and they couldn’t see a thing. The coaster took its first big dip, and Pep screamed. Coke held on tightly. In the dark, they couldn’t tell when the next curve would be, or when the next plunge would be, and that was what made Disaster Transport so terrifying. The car went through a series of twisting turns, and then, suddenly, for no reason, it screeched to a halt.
They were sitting in total darkness, not moving. It looked something like this…
“What’s going on?” Pep asked nervously.
“Relax,” Coke told his sister. “This is probably part of the ride. They want you to think you’ll be stuck here. I’m sure it will start up again in a few seconds.”
It didn’t.
Dark. Tunnel. Underground. Silence. Pep didn’t like this situation.
“Do you think it’s a mechanical problem?” she asked, looking all around to see if she could see a crack of light anywhere. Her eyes were starting to adjust to the dark. “We should tell somebody.”
That’s when she heard a muffled cough coming from the car behind them.
“Hello,” two voices said pleasantly.
Pep thought frantically. Hadn’t that car been empty when the ride started? How did those people get in there? Could they have possibly climbed in during the ride?
The two people in the car behind them pulled little flashlights out of their pockets and shined them upward at their own smiling faces.
They were men. One of them had a mustache. And both were wearing bowler hats.
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkk!” Pep screamed. “The bowler dudes!”
“Holy !@#$%!” Coke exclaimed.
“Long time no see!” one of the bowler dudes said, a smile on his demented face. “Fancy meeting you two in here, of all places.”
Pep screamed again as Coke frantically tried to remove his seat belt.
“Don’t bother screaming, sweetheart,” the mustachioed bowler dude said. “Nobody will notice. Everybody screams in here. That’s why we decided this would be the perfect place.”
“The perfect place for what?” Pep asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.
“The perfect place to kill you!”
“Hahahaha!” chortled the other bowler dude.
In the dark, Coke couldn’t get his hands on the release button to his seat belt. The bowler dudes climbed out of their car and strolled over, as if they were taking a walk in the park.
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkk!” Pep screamed again.
“Help!” shouted Coke.
“Shut up!”
The bowler dudes pulled out long pocketknives and used them to cut through Coke’s and Pep’s seat belts. Then they pulled the twins to their feet.
“Get your hands off of me!” Coke shouted. “I’ll call the cops on you!”
The bowler dudes laughed their cackling laugh, as if that was the funniest thing they had ever heard.
The twins were dragged through the dark tunnel for about ten yards until they reached a doorway. The bowler dudes pushed them through the door, across a short wooden walkway, and into another doorway that led to a dark room. There, they forced Coke and Pep into metal folding chairs and tied their arms behind their backs with rope.
“Have fun!” one of them said as he flipped a light on. Both of the bowler dudes went back out the door they had entered, cackling the whole time.
Coke and Pep looked around the small room. There were ice cream dispensers along the walls and posters with photos of ice cream pops on them. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where they were.
In the back of a Mister Softee truck.
Chapter 11
I SCREAM. YOU SCREAM.
The windows of the Mister Softee truck, where kids would ordinarily be standing in line to buy ice cream, were covered. It appeared to be dark outside, which seemed odd because it was the middle of the day. Suddenly, the Mister Softee theme song began to play.
“What are we doing in here?” Pep asked.
“How should I know?” Coke replied.
“I’ll tell you what you’re doing in here,” a voice said from the front of the truck.
A chubby guy came out from the driver’s seat. He was wearing a white Mister Softee uniform, complete with the paper hat. When he pulled off the hat, his bright red hair could be seen.
“Archie Clone!” Coke shouted.
“No!” Pep yelled. “Not him!”
“Well, well, well,” Archie Clone said, a smile on his face. “We meet again.”
Coke struggled to pull his arms loose from the ropes, but there was no way to get them out.
“That was pretty clever, the way you used that Cheesehead to escape from my french fry simulator,” Archie Clone continued.
“What do you want from us now?” Coke barked.
“The same thing I wanted from you last time,” Archie Clone replied. “Your lives.”
“You’ll never get away with this,” Pep told him, struggling to free her hands from the ropes. “Our parents are right outside.”
“Parents!” Archie Clone said, with a snort. “Your parents think you’re outside having a wholesome, carefree, and perfectly safe afternoon, Pep. It wouldn’t occur to them in a million years that an amusement park
is the perfect place to commit murder. I mean, think about it. A simple loose screw on a roller coaster. A sharp blade positioned at neck level for just a moment in a thrill ride. A real monster in the haunted house. It would be so easy! And nobody would ever know. There are frequently ‘accidents’ at amusement parks, if you know what I mean.”
“If it’s so easy, why didn’t you do one of those things?” Coke asked.
“Oh, fatal roller coaster accidents are so cliché,” Archie Clone said. “I prefer to do things my own way, Coke. This is how I express my creativity. Some people paint. Others make music or films. I’m a magician. Ha, ha! I make kids disappear. It’s my art.”
The twins could hardly believe what they were hearing. If Archie Clone hadn’t proven his insanity at their first meeting, he was proving it now. It was possible that he might be even crazier than Dr. Warsaw was.
“Tell me something,” he said. “You kids like ice cream, don’t you?”
“Why do you care?” Pep shouted defiantly.
“Pep, I wish you wouldn’t be so angry with me all the time,” Archie Clone said soothingly. “I just want to give you some ice cream. I thought we were friends.”
“Over my dead body!” she shouted back.
“Precisely!”
Coke looked around for a weapon, a tool, anything he could use to get out of this situation. He wished he had his backpack, which was in the RV. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as his hands were tied tightly behind his back.
Suddenly, Coke remembered that he had one thing in his possession—the Pez dispenser in his back pocket. He struggled to wriggle his right hand around until he could reach it. The Pez dispenser wasn’t exactly a knife, but when he flipped the head up, it did have a semi-sharp edge. He began rubbing it against the rope behind his back.
“What are you doing here?” Coke said, just to keep Archie Clone talking while he worked on the rope. “Why are you bothering us again?”
