“That issue has been…outprioritized,” Nate said, diplomatically.
“Okay,” the captain followed. “What do you want to do?”
Kerri faced Deputy Copperseed first. “We should evacuate the town. Something big is going to happen, and we may be able to prevent it, but if we fail…Is there an evacuation plan?”
“There is,” the policeman confirmed, in a tone that clearly implied that was the end of the good news, “but it was drafted when we were three to five stationed in Blyton Hills; now it’s just me and a volunteer.” He chin-pointed at Joey. “I can call the sheriff in Belden, but we’d still be undermanned.”
“Quickest way would be to bring in the army,” Kerri suggested, turning to Captain Al. “Maybe your friends at Umatilla?”
“I can’t bring in the army, Kerri,” the captain replied, overwhelmed. He seemed truly devastated to disappoint her. “I have friends at the airbase, but not that many friends.”
“Look, there are people we can call in case of emergency,” Copperseed assisted, “but they won’t rush in unless the emergency is already happening, or we have staggering evidence it will happen. The dead thing in the freezer is not gonna cut it.”
“It’s not about the creatures anymore,” Nate told him. “We’re talking natural disaster.” He underscored the word “natural.”
The deputy paused, and the patent concern in his stern, furrowed guise intimately cheered Nate, a little. It was nice to have the tough cop’s concern for once.
“Well, look, Joey and I might be able to convince people to leave everything and come with us,” Copperseed said. “But we need to give them a tangible reason. What is the threat?”
“Okay, that’s fair,” Kerri started, flipping her hair and wishing she had an unopened can of Coke. “It’s kind of a long story, but—”
ANDY: Wait.
(They all wait.)
ANDY: Would it be quicker to just give people an actual emergency?
PART FOUR
PANIC
Andy Humpty-Dumptied onto a steel girder, ripped a long strip of duct tape, and fixed the last four sticks of dynamite under the junction of the girder and the pillar, where the secondary explosion had the best odds to ignite it.
Below her, Deputy Copperseed, in charge of damage control, carted the last stack of flammable material out of the room while Captain Al finished fiddling with the power switchboard near the entrance, which when activated would send the triggering discharge into the fuse.
“I think we’re set,” he said through the pocket flashlight between his teeth, turning to inspect the mostly cleared blast area. “Should those barrels be there? I’d rather not cause a real ecological disaster if I can avoid it.”
“They’re all empty; I checked,” Copperseed said, wiping his hands and joining Al in the middle of the vast cargo bay, under the long skylights. “And I thought we could use some shrapnel anyway.”
Andy slid off the girder and squat-landed on the floor between them. The three reviewed the explosive charges they had placed strategically across the cargo bay to go off in chain reaction. They weren’t handling that much explosive power, but each charge had been planted in key architectural joints to increase the damage and cover their tracks. It was like playing demolitionists, but without the years of study or the civil liability.
“You know,” the captain began, “it’s spooky how fast you came up with this idea, Andy.”
“Yeah. Almost as spooky as how easily you can build a detonator out of junkyard material, Cap,” she said, and then she spied a fraction of a smile on Copperseed’s hair-thin lips. “And you were disturbingly quick to jump onto the Let’s blow up the chemical plant wagon yourself, Deputy.”
The policeman acknowledged the hit, but didn’t avert his eyes from their opus.
“I always hated this place,” he said. “Damn corporation, building their shit in town, shutting it down, and never cleaning up after themselves. And besides, they are kicking our asses in court.”
“Oh.” Andy frowned, mentally catching a loose end in the air. “Actually, if you’re talking about the lawsuit for the death of the sheep, Kerri says it probably wasn’t RH’s fault after all. Chances are a small earthquake released a cloud of gas from the lake, and it traveled downriver to the grazing field and wiped them out.”
All three fell silent for a second, admiring the seamless connection of that loose end.
“Huh,” said Copperseed. “Still, they should’ve dismantled this years ago. Maybe this will make them listen, if there’s something left to dismantle afterward.”
“Oh, there will be,” Captain Al said with a downplaying grin. “It won’t bring the whole thing down. Just a good bang.”
Andy bit her lip on recalling. “Shit. Captain, I’m sorry, I…I lost your service pistol at the bottom of the Allen shaft. I’m so sorry.”
Al scoffed, slapped her shoulder.
“Hey. Never cry about a gun. Sadly it’s one of the easiest things to replace in this country. Shall we?”
They gave a final nod to their evening’s work and then headed out, the captain laying the wire along the way. They were stepping out into the dregs of the day.
“You know what would actually happen if we were found responsible for this, right?” the captain polled as they marched across the flat, barren grounds around the chemical plant.
Andy smirked first at the loyalty implied in that first person plural, then answered. “Probably we’d get charged with…I don’t know, arson?”
“More likely terrorism,” Copperseed noted. “That’s serious business. More serious than breaking out of a Texas prison, anyway.”
The nonchalance of the remark didn’t escape her. Still, she kept walking.
“How long have you known?”
“I looked you kids up as soon as you left the station,” he said. “Don’t worry; I didn’t report you. The captain vouched for you, and that works for me.”
Captain Al did not say a word. Ahead, they could already make out the silhouettes of the others waiting on top of the knoll against the last dying light. An orange flame sparkled among them.
“Do they know?” Al asked.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “There are no secrets between us.”
—
Kerri was sitting on the grass finishing off the detonator, with Joey spying over one shoulder, trying to offer advice, and Tim over her other shoulder, being even more annoying. Nate sat off on his own, chin propped on his knees, gazing at the early stars. Andy and the captain and Deputy Copperseed joined them shortly after, and the captain handed the end of the wire to Kerri, who connected it to the basic rocker switch upgraded to demolition detonator.
“Do we have enough firepower?” Nate asked, not sounding really involved. He could remember the names of at least three mental hospital patients he had met who had been committed for acts much less cinematic than the one he was about to be an accomplice in.
“Yup. It’s gonna make some great fireworks,” Andy said, helping Al complete the circuit by connecting the switch to an old car battery that would provide the minimal power needed. Bombs are efficient devices like that, she appreciated.
The hulking black silhouette of the chemical plant seemed suddenly unimpressive: overdressed with tortuous pipes and fire stairways, but also so ugly and forlorn and unsuspecting of what was coming, Andy couldn’t help but feel like she was plotting to throw a firecracker at an old lady’s feet.
“Right, let’s go through this one more time,” Captain Al prompted. “Once we hit the switch…”
“I go back to the police station,” Copperseed picked up, “call the sheriff in Belden, report a massive explosion at the abandoned chemical plant. It’s an environmental emergency. Everyone goes nuts. Sheriff calls the mayor, mayor calls EPA in Seattle, EPA notifies FEMA and orders evacuation. Which we will have already undertaken.”
“Once the emergency is declared, my friends at Umatilla airbase are authorized to come and assist,�
� Al followed. “I know two high-ranking officers, and they know already that the environmental emergency is a cover; what they come to fight is a biological threat. Pictures and notes from your autopsy helped there,” he told Kerri. “But they can’t leave the base until EPA has declared the emergency. Say…four, five hours.”
“We’ll be moving in at midnight,” Andy said. “When your friends arrive, take them straight to the lake. Guard the shores; if you don’t hear from us by dawn, or if you see flares, just take over the isle.”
“I’ll make sure they bring their swimsuits.”
“By then,” Copperseed resumed, “EPA will have set a perimeter, assisted with the sheltering, and sent in a damage assessment unit to this area. I reckon six to eight hours.”
“One way or another, all four of us will be back by then,” Andy said.
Joey reacted when he realized the number four included the dog. “You mean five of us.”
“No, I mean four.”
“Oh, come on! After all I— What more can I do to prove—”
“Joey!” Kerri said, so commandingly that Tim mistakenly stood to attention. “You don’t need to prove anything, you already proved it. But we need you here. Blyton Hills needs you here. The people trust you; they’ll listen to you. Their lives depend on you moving them to safety.”
She waited for Joey to comprehend how literal her words were. He seemed to get it.
“If we fail tonight,” she continued, “and there’s a new tremor under the lake, everybody in Blyton Hills could go the way of the sheep. So it’s vital everyone gets out of town and authorities be ready to carry out more evacuations if we fuck up. A chemical plant exploding will keep them on their toes.” She held Joey’s blue-eyed stare until he nodded, steel-resolved. “At dawn, find a way through the perimeter, drive your truck to the lake, and stand guard in our car; we might need you.”
“Gotcha,” he rogered. “Why your car, though? The truck will drive better up there.”
“Because we’re gonna rig our car,” Andy one-lined, letting the science consultant expand on the premise.
“If a gas cloud rises, all combustion engines inside it will stop working. Fuel needs oxygen to burn,” Kerri explained. “We’ll attach one of the oxygen bottles we’ve got left to our carburetor, so we can switch to it if the worst happens. It might buy us just long enough to outrun the cloud.” She checked Captain Al, with whom she had discussed the feasibility of that part of the plan. “We hope.”
The captain nodded zenfully, and handed her the detonator. Kerri’s hair proverbially shivered with anticipation when she touched the device, her mind considering the fabulous implications of a single click.
“Once we do this, there’s no way back.” She offered the device to Andy. “Do the honors?”
Andy didn’t move. She was feeling like she had during the first day of their car trip together. She had never considered she and Kerri would ever be blowing up a chemical plant, but had she been able to foresee it, she would have expected the occasion to be more festive, not part of a life-or-death mission. That was a strange thought.
“Together,” she said.
She took Kerri’s hand, fingertips holding their breath on the contact, and hovered them over the switch, waiting for a third hand to join them.
“Nate?”
The boy was still camped a few feet away, just within earshot of the conversation, sunken in his thoughts more deeply than the girls had seen him ever since the loony bin.
“Nate,” Andy repeated. “We will never split up. I promise.”
Nate breathed in, then approached them, laid his hand on his cousin Kerri’s, and swallowed the dry Rubicon pebble in his throat.
KERRI: On three. One.
NATE: Two.
ANDY: Three.
They flipped the switch.
Four seconds passed.
Then six.
Captain Al stood up, a frowning Andy followed suit, and then the flak of the first explosion blossomed, out of synchrony with the ground-shaking boom, until both the subsequent flashes and the sounds mashed together in a thunderous ball of fire rising into the starry sky.
Andy averted her eyes just a second to confirm that Copperseed was now fully smiling, the red glow of burning collateral damage expectedly suiting his sharp, rugged features.
They remained on the knoll for a while, under the magical spell of things going kablooey in the night.
Tim had grown tired of all the boat trips and he spent this last one nested on the driver’s seat with Kerri, dismayed head draped over her thigh, hoping for some affection. The Pennaquick County Police had contributed to the Blyton Summer Detective Club’s arsenal with a pair of pump-action assault rifles, a new two-way radio, and loads of extra ammo, which Andy was jamming into every available pocket, along with small boxes of strike-anywhere matches to perform flame tests. Kerri was still holding on to her knife. They all had flashlights and respirators around their necks.
A last familiar shape lay between the empty bags on the deck after Andy had finished gearing up: it was the pickax—the one she had retrieved from the mines and inadvertently left in Joey’s boat the previous afternoon. She flipped it in the air, calibrating its weight, and decided to slip it through a belt loop in her pants.
“Can’t be too prepared,” she commented. “I’ll trade you Uncle Emmet’s shotgun for a rifle, okay, Nate?”
Nate sat astern in the dark, careful not to lean his arm over the bulwark.
“Nate,” Peter said beside him. “Lieutenant Ripley is talking to you.”
“We’re doing the same shit all over again,” Nate muttered, to no one in particular.
Andy couldn’t tell if she was supposed to overhear or just hear that, but she followed anyway.
“We’re retracing our steps,” she rephrased. “After the lake, after exploring the gold mines, we talked to witnesses, hit the library, connected the mines and the mansion, and we begged for someone to ferry us to the isle, until finally one evening exploring the lake we came across the rowboat, and here we are. This is the night we catch our guy.”
“Yeah, ’cause it went so well for us last time,” Nate snapped. “Remind me what’s different?”
Andy simply opened her jacket and let the weapons say hello. “We’re prepared. We know who the bad guy is.” A draft of ice-cold tailwind pushed a long-lost bang of black hair across her face. “And I, for one, am way angrier.”
She left to help Kerri dock the boat, and Nate stayed sitting there, savoring her words.
“She was always angry,” Peter sidenoted.
—
They were pulling over at the pier when Andy, rope in hand, noticed another line tied to the post. Kerri shut off the engine, and the hollow sound of the rowboat drunkenly nudging the pier became evident. The towering firs on Deboën Isle remained silent in expectation.
They debarked, and the girls moored the motorboat while Nate advanced inland and confronted the mansion.
Atop the building, in the round attic window, a soft yellow light pulsed.
The three kids and the dog stood in silence at the foot of the front stairs, in the hazy light-puddle from that one lit room. Thirteen years, and Deboën Mansion had not lost its arrogance.
Andy shoved a rifle into Nate’s hands, flung another one at Kerri, and cocked Uncle Emmet’s shotgun herself, single-handed.
Kerri, sight line pinned to the lit window, said, “We don’t fire until we see his face.”
Andy tried to make out the minutiae of her expression in the dark.
“You serious?”
“Yes. We faced guys in costumes before. And we always had the good sense not to kill them, but to expose them. Shoot first, ask later may be standard procedure for police in Compton, but it’s not gonna be mine.”
“You both talk like he can be killed,” Nate challenged.
“He can be killed, Nate,” Andy affirmed. “The wheezers killed him once. (Points in the general direction of the maul
ed east wing.) If that necrodouchebag thinks I’m any less nasty than those wiggly spider-armed motherfuckers, he’s got a Pennaquick Telegraph Breaking News Edition coming.”
“That was a good line,” Peter admitted.
Andy stepped forward and rounded on them. From Tim’s lower perspective, the smoldering yellow disk of the attic window shone around her head like the nimbus of a shotgun-and-pickax-wielding angel.
“Listen to me. This is nothing like the last time. At all,” she spoke, challenging the team to argue it. “Last time we were kids. We came here scared, full of good intentions, trying to solve a mystery. And Daniel Deboën used us. He bullied us.”
She blew the strand of hair off her face, then changed her mind and nodded it back on. This was a special night.
“We’re not kids anymore. We’re not taking shelter in the haunted house—we’re going into the house to drag the haunter out on his sorry ass. Are you with me?”
Myriad tiny voices within Kerri’s hair went yeah like a Rage Against the Machine chorus as Kerri cocked the rifle, lips pursed to keep the fury within.
Nate tautened up, gripped his weapon, and snorted his fear back in.
Tim barked as happily as a dog ever did.
The interior of Deboën Mansion blinked awake, startled at the first blast at the doors, and the portraits and sets of armory stared in disbelief at the front entrance as the pickax burst through the lightcrack, severing the lock, and Andy kicked her way in, moonlit and angerstruck, doors shattering the decoration behind as she shouted at the shocked furniture:
“Blyton Summer Fucking Detective Club! Anybody home?”
Kerri and Nate came to flank her right after, rifles aimed at the horrified haunted house.
Tim scurried between them, promenaded across the hall, stopped by a decorative suit of armor, and peed on it.
KERRI: That’s the spirit, boy.
—
Nate’s flashlight surveyed the area while Andy struck a match. Fat, healthy-looking flame. The carpeted stairs to the second floor stared down at them like Old West bank clerks would at very loud, untidy robbers.
Meddling Kids Page 24
