by Dustin Brady
“Then we need to get going! Did your note say where to start? Maybe like a mobster hideout or mad scientist lair or something.”
“Yeah, it did say actually.” Bre uncovered the hole again, and light streamed into the cave. “The school lunchroom.”
CHAPTER NINE
Grandma Murray
Jared followed Bre out of the cave. “The lunchroom? Really? What could possibly be going on in the lunchroom? I mean that meatloaf is a crime, am I right? Hahaha.”
Bre rolled her eyes in the most exaggerated way possible. “Can you just help me push this rock back into place?”
Jared put his shoulder against the rock and pushed. “And can we just talk about this magic eight ball for a second?” he asked. “Like, how does it know what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know, but these things are never actually magic. My guess is there’s a tiny supercomputer in there that figures out what’s going to happen. The note said that it performs some light time travel calculations.”
“Light time travel? What does that even mean?”
“Light time travel! Like a small amount of time travel — I don’t know, I’m just telling you what the note said.”
“And we’re using this powerful, time-traveling computer to uncover a lunchroom plot?”
Bre pointed to the eight ball. Jared looked down.
YUP
Bre stopped Jared when they could see the school through the trees. “We’ve got to be careful,” she said. “You said those passes that Lenny turned in are only good through the morning, right?”
“Well yeah, but can’t we just tell someone that there’s an evil plot inside the lunchroom?”
“Do you want to be the one to tell them that we discovered this plot from a magic eight ball?”
“Oh. Probably not.”
“Just stay low and keep out of sight.”
The eight ball led Jared and Bre to the back delivery entrance. They waited the one minute and 46 seconds the eight ball said it would take for the UPS guy to walk through with a package, then scrambled inside right before the door closed all the way. The eight ball led them around two hall monitors to the school kitchen. Jared paused to consult the eight ball again, then slowly opened the kitchen door.
None of the lunch ladies noticed two sixth graders in the kitchen because they were too busy with the early lunch rush. Jared and Bre crawled inside the pantry and peeked around the corner. Jared prepared himself to see something truly horrific — like the hot dogs being made from real dogs. What he saw instead was definitely worse.
Nothing.
Nothing exciting was happening. Just bored adults doing boring adult things. Jared waited for a minute before looking back down at his eight ball and whispering, “What are we looking for?”
JUST WAIT
Another minute later, one of the lunch ladies walked back to the pantry. It was Grandma Murray — Jared’s favorite because she would always scoop out extra pudding. Grandma Murray wasn’t actually a grandma to anyone in the school, but all the kids called her “grandma” because she had gray hair and remembered everyone’s birthday. Bre and Jared shrank behind a stack of paper towels while Grandma Murry rounded the corner.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted over her shoulder. “I told my doctor that lunch is the worst time for appointments, but he never listens!” She turned back to the pantry, flipped on the light, nervously looked around and started loading bread onto a cart.
Stealing bread? Seriously? It wasn’t even the good bread. She was taking the gross gluten-free bread the school kept for kids with wheat allergies. Grandma Murray looked around again before wheeling the cart out the door. Jared turned to Bre.
“Are all of your adventures this exciting?”
“Just ask it what to do next.”
Jared rolled his eyes and asked.
FOLLOW HER
“Let’s go!” Jared whispered with mock excitement. “Maybe she’s stealing jelly too!”
Bre sighed. “Come on.”
Jared led the way out of the kitchen. He walked with the confidence of someone who knew his biggest danger came from a grandma stealing bread. This was unfortunate, because just then an actual danger spotted him.
“Hey Buttface.”
Jared turned to see a pair of plaid bellbottoms walking toward him.
“Hey Kodey.”
“Give me that iPod.”
“I don’t have time for this right now.”
Kodey stepped so close that his chin hairs could almost touch Jared’s nose.
“I said give me that iPod.”
Bre piped up. “We don’t have time for this.”
That caught Kodey off guard for a second. He turned to Bre. “You two the dynamic duo now?” He sneered. “Cute. Real cute. Well I’m sorry to break up this date, but…” He spun around clocked Jared in the jaw. When Jared stumbled backward, Kodey lunged for the pocket where he’d seen Jared put the iPod that morning. Instead he pulled out the magic eight ball.
“Give that back!” Jared yelled as he lunged at Kodey.
Kodey held the eight ball high above his head and smiled. “Should I give it back?” he asked the magic eight ball.
MY SOURCES SAY NO
“Ohhhhhh,” Kodey stuck his lip out in a pouty face. “So sorry, my sources say no. But if you want, you can…”
POW!
Bre landed a karate kick to Kodey’s face.
“Owwwww!” Kodey stumbled backward and dropped the eight ball. Jared scooped it up and started running.
“What is going on?!” Vice Principal Fuqua heard the commotion from down the hall and started walking toward Jared and Kodey.
“What is going on?” Jared repeated the question. “Well, I…” he looked down at the eight ball for help.
RUN
Jared put his head down and booked it toward the service exit. Bre followed close behind.
“Hey! STOP!” Vice Principal Fuqua yelled. Jared didn’t stop. He was now a fugitive from school, which didn’t feel great. When he burst through the service door with Bre, he spotted Grandma Murray loading the last of the bread into her minivan.
“Follow me!” Bre yelled. Jared followed Bre to the side of the school where her bright pink bike was locked up. “Hop on!”
Jared wrinkled his nose and tried to come up with an excuse for not riding a girl bike. “Can this even fit two people? And like, do you have enough helmets…”
“HOP ON!”
After witnessing that karate kick one minute earlier, Jared decided that arguing with Bre might not be smart. He sat on the seat. Bre straddled the bar in front of him and started pedaling.
“There she is!” Jared pointed to a minivan turning left onto the street. Bre put her head down and pushed harder. Fortunately, Grandma Murray drove like — well — like a grandma, so Bre could keep up just enough to spot the van before it made its next turn. Even more fortunately, the drive lasted only three minutes. Bre made it to the last street just in time to see Grandma Murray turn into a factory with a sign out front that said “Allied Fresh, Inc.”
“Do you think that’s it?” Jared asked.
Bre didn’t answer. She was staring at something in silence. Jared followed her stare to a van parked in the shadows next to the factory.
It was the news van from earlier.
CHAPTER TEN
Don't Be a Baby
“I changed my mind,” Jared said.
“Cool,” Bre said. “You want me to drop you off back at the school then? Cuz I’m sure they’re real excited to talk to you.”
“Oh, uh, I mean…”
“Come on, you’re a hero now. Don’t be a baby.”
Bre and Jared hid the bike (as much as one can hide a hot pink bike in the grungy factory part of town) and crouch-walked to the side of the building. Grandma Murray was just finishing unloading the bread from her van onto a cart. They hid as she walked past them into the door.
“Now what?” Jared asked the eig
ht ball.
TO THE ROOF
Bre shook her head. “Why does it always have to be the roof?”
Jared asked the eight ball a few more questions and led Bre back to the news van. “It says we have to climb on top of there and then make the long jump onto that awning, where we’ll roll…”
Bre closed her eyes. “Stop. I can’t think about it or I’ll throw up. Just lead the way, and I’ll follow.”
Jared shrugged, jumped onto the hood of the van, then completed the American Ninja Warrior course the eight ball had laid out for him to get to the roof. Bre followed step for step, making sure to never look down. When they got to the roof, Bre let out a long sigh. “We made it! Now where?”
THE AIR VENT
“Seriously?!”
Bre walked to the air vent and stared in disbelief. Jared joined her. “Well,” he said. “I agree that it doesn’t look like the sturdiest…”
“It’s an AIR vent! It’s made for moving air! Not people!”
“Well yeah, but in the movies, people always crawl through air vents.”
“THIS IS NOT THE MOVIES!”
Bre had a point. Jared asked the eight ball again. Again it came back with the air vent. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Because I don’t think this will hold…”
DON’T BE A BABY
“I just decided that I don’t like that thing,” Bre said.
Jared crawled in first, then Bre. The air duct was pitch black and filled with spider webs. The words on the eight ball glowed a little bit, so Jared put the ball face-up in his shirt pocket to use as a little flashlight as he crawled forward. He made it just a few feet before hearing a loud creeeeeeeeeeaaaaaak. He paused. Bre held her breath. Jared crawled one step forward and then —
SNAP!
His stomach flipped into his chest as the air duct dropped a couple of feet. He tried to hold on, but the duct had turned into a slide. Bre rolled into him, and they both tumbled down the duct and crashed through the ceiling into a closet filled with empty boxes. They didn’t have time to check for injuries, because they heard an adult voice as soon as they landed on the boxes.
“What was that?!”
They got low. The voice was coming from the next room. A walkie talkie beeped.
“Greg,” the voice said. “Check the roof. Sounds like something crashed up there.”
“Got it,” another voice crackled over the radio.
Jared looked around the room. A little bit of light was streaming in through a vent near the ceiling. He stacked up boxes to climb and get a better look. Bre joined him. The vent was just big enough to let them peek into the office next door, where they saw a tall, bald man towering over Grandma Murray. The middle-aged man was wearing a lab coat and looked perfectly normal except for his left hand. His left hand was twice the size of his right and seemed to be covered in a sort of tree bark.
“I just need you to promise me that this is safe,” she said.
The bald guy put his right hand (the normal one) on her shoulder. “Of course, Mrs. Murray. You’re doing something good here.”
“Because it doesn’t feel good.”
“Mrs. Murray, not only are you earning enough money to send your niece to college,” he patted the briefcase on the desk, “but you’re also an important part of research that will change millions of lives.”
“If this is so good, I don’t understand why I have to sneak around.”
“Mrs. Murray, as I explained earlier, this is for science. People are always going to try to stand in the way of science. Like the true pioneers of science before us, we must do whatever is necessary to make the world a better place. Do you understand?”
Grandma Murray sighed. “Not really, but just as long as it’s safe for the kids.”
“Of course it’s safe. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to make sure that everything is progressing well. The bread should be ready to take back to the school any minute now.”
Grandma Murray nodded, and the guy walked out of the room.
FOLLOW HIM
Jared cracked open the closet door to find that they’d landed in an office area overlooking the factory. The bald guy walked down the stairs, while Jared and Bre hung back in the shadows on the catwalk above. They watched the bald guy talk to some factory workers below, then pick up one of the loaves Grandma Murray had brought. He opened it, sniffed it then nodded approvingly.
“What are they doing?” Jared whispered.
LOOK BELOW
Jared and Bre looked down. Directly below them, two factory workers were tearing open loaves of the school’s gluten-free bread and dunking them slice-by-slice into an open bag filled with white powder. They would then dust off each piece of bread, weigh it on a scale, dust it some more, and put it back into the bag.
Jared turned to Bre and shrugged. None of this made sense. It certainly didn’t seem like an operation that would require thugs in vans scaring kids. What were they missing?
Suddenly Bre’s eyes got big. She grabbed Jared’s shoulder and pointed to the bag below. Jared squinted to make out the lettering. Wheat…wheat something? Then he saw it.
“100% WHEAT CONCENTRATE”
That didn’t seem good.
He leaned over the railing to get a better look at the fine print on the bag. When he did, the eight ball fell from his shirt pocket into the open bag below.
That didn’t seem good at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Clunk
DON’T LEAN
The eight ball, which had landed face-up in the wheat concentrate, was displaying a message that would have been real helpful for Jared to see seconds earlier. Fortunately, wheat concentrate is soft, so the ball’s fall got muffled enough that nobody seemed to notice. Unfortunately, Jared was stuck in enemy territory without a superpower.
Jared turned to Bre, but she had already disappeared back into the closet. Jared followed her. In the closet, Bre furiously rummaged through junk.
“What are you doing?”
“Not so loud!”
Jared lowered his voice. “What are you doing?”
“We’ve got to get that eight ball back.”
“No duh.”
“Listen, can you just help me find… AHA!” Bre pulled out a long, thick rope from the pile of junk.
“What’s that for?”
“I don’t think we can take the stairs because they’re out in the open. Our best bet is going to be this rope.”
Jared had been hoping for something a little better. “You want to swing down like Tarzan?! That’s your plan?”
“I don’t want to swing anywhere. You’re going to do it. Also, it’s going to be a little more Spider-Man than Tarzan.”
“What are you going to be doing during all of this? Planning my funeral arrangements?”
“I’ll handle the distraction so nobody sees a sixth grader hanging from a rope in the middle of their factory.”
“This seems less than ideal.”
It took some convincing, but Jared finally came around to Bre’s plan. She would take boxes into the ceiling, crawl to the opposite side of the factory, open up another ceiling tile and dump the boxes one by one onto the floor 30 feet below. While the workers would be trying to figure out what was going on, Jared would loop the rope around the railing to use as a pulley, then lower himself to the ground undetected. Bre would crawl back to the roof, and Jared would escape with the eight ball and bag of wheat to take to the police. As they say in the movies, the plan was so crazy that it just might work.
Jared helped Bre push a few boxes into the ceiling. He then found his spot on the catwalk, looped the rope around the railing and waited for his signal.
CLUNK!
That was it — the sound of a box hitting the ground. Jared took a deep breath.
A radio below squawked to life. “Greg, do you want to check that out?”
“I’m on it.”
Without looking down, Jared looped his legs around the left side of the ro
pe and started lowering himself to the ground with the right side. All the while, he heard Bre continue with her distraction.
CLUNK! CLUNK! CLUNK!
Just a few more feet.
CLUNKCLUNKCLUNK CRAAAAAAASH!
Wow, that was loud! Bre must have dumped all the boxes at once. Jared finally made it to the ground. Like everyone else in the area, the workers dunking the bread had run to the other side of the factory to check out the commotion. Jared unlooped the rope from the railing and ran to the bag of wheat concentrate. He put the eight ball in his pocket, rolled up the bag and picked it off the table. That’s when he felt the hand on his shoulder. Not a regular hand — more like a giant Hulk hand.
Jared slowly turned around. The hand was attached to the bald guy who had been talking to Mrs. Murray. Behind him stood three guys in lab coats. Behind them stood a scowling, stocky man wearing a blue shirt with a tag that said, “Greg.” He was holding onto a beat-up Bre.
Bald guy motioned to Jared with his finger. “You need to come with us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Beehive
The bad guys — Jared was pretty comfortable calling them “bad guys” at this point — led Jared and Bre to a small room off of the main factory. On the way, Jared was able to work his way back to Bre.
“I’m sorry,” Bre whispered. “The ceiling broke.”
“It broke?”
“Yeah, like I was throwing boxes down, and then I heard a crack, and then I fell.”
“Are you OK?”
“I think so. The boxes broke my fall a little. I just can’t put too much pressure on this ankle.” Bre shot Jared a little glare. “I told you I hate heights.”
“I know.”
Once they were inside the room — which was bare except for two seats and an empty metal table — everyone else left except for Greg and the bald guy. Jared tried to plan his next move. Unless this Greg goon left them alone in the room, Jared couldn’t pull the eight ball out of his pocket without risking it getting taken away. Greg stood in a corner and the bald guy motioned to the chairs.
