by Paul Tobin
“Uhh, Nate?” I said. It no longer seemed quite so wonderful that we were being attacked. In fact, I was fully prepared to vote against it.
“We’ll be fine,” Nate said. “Betsy’s variable atomic structure is designed to absorb light, even that from lasers. You see, the photonic wavelength will—”
“Hey, Betsy?” I said.
“Yes?”
“You okay?”
“It tickles, but I’m fine.”
“Good,” I told her. “Nate was starting to go on about science, and I really didn’t understand what he was talking about.”
“He’s difficult to talk to sometimes.”
“Yeah.”
“But he has a nice smile,” Betsy said. “It makes my tires squeal.”
“Yeah,” I said again, mostly because I had no idea what else I could have possibly said.
“We are being attacked here,” Nate mentioned, truthfully. The lasers had ceased firing from all around us, but men and women were now rushing out from various doorways and crashing out from windows, all of them wearing the distinctively colored suits of the Red Death Tea Society.
There were possibly as many as twenty of these men and women, each of them with a laser-shooter-thingy that looked like a chubby spear, except the ends had fiercely glowing blue lights instead of being sharp and pointy. The assassins were also all carrying teacups, sipping from them during the attack. This made the attack seem slightly more casual, although not any less lethal.
“Hmm,” Nate said. “We can’t let them delay us. They’re just trying to slow us down so that Maculte can reach the school first. That’s not going to happen.”
He stopped, and his eyes narrowed, like the way a gunfighter’s eyes do in the western movies.
“Betsy,” he said. “I am authorizing Rocket One Mode.” His voice was grim.
“Rocket One Mode?” she said. The glove box vibrated. Her voice was breathy.
“Rocket One Mode?” I asked. My voice was confused. What was Rocket One Mode? Were we going to fire rockets at the assassins from the Red Death Tea Society? I wasn’t sure if that was the smartest thing to do, because there were other people around and—
CLICK.
It was a loud noise, and it was also more than a noise, because some weird seat belts sprang out from my seat and wrapped around me before I could blink. The seat belts were like tubes, with some sort of liquid inside them.
“What is—?” I asked, but that was as far as I got before . . .
CLICK.
And then . . .
GLURGLE GLURGLE.
My seat suddenly came to life, gone soft and liquid, with the whole seat wrapping around me as if I’d fallen into a big tub of warm jelly.
And then . . . RUMBLE.
“Rumble?” I said. My voice was still quite confused.
“Rumble,” Betsy said, and then I was slammed back into my tub of jelly (meaning, my seat) because we were suddenly blasting forward at speeds that made the buildings around us blur.
“Rocket Three!” Betsy said, the most excited I’ve ever heard her.
“T-t-take th-this p-pill,” Nate told me. He was holding out a blue-colored pill, stuttering because the acceleration was making it difficult to talk, difficult to do anything. It felt as if a giant hand was pushing at me, and also like there was a giant gas bubble being squeezed out of me.
“BURP!” I told Nate. That was the “gas bubble” thing.
“Wh-what?” he said.
“I m-meant o-okay!” I was fighting to raise my hand and take the pill, but it felt like there was an anchor tied to my arm. It was lucky I’d been doing my adventure exercises, having built an obstacle course in my backyard so that I can work out every day and get into “adventure” shape. My obstacle course has a row of hurdles (which I can totally jump over, even backward) and a series of ropes that I either swing from or climb up, and there’s a punching bag on which I’ve painted the faces of Jakob Maculte and Luria Pevermore, the two leaders of the Red Death Tea Society. All in all, I rule that obstacle course, so my arms were powerful enough to lift that blue pill of Nate’s despite the way gravity was hugely increased (and immensely annoyed) by the speeds Nate and I were traveling. It was an effort, though, so I hoped that things wouldn’t get any worse, because—
“Rocket Two!” Betsy yelled.
“Guhh,” I gurgled.
We were moving even faster now, zooming through Polt at speeds that made the blocks go by in heartbeats.
I swallowed the blue pill. It was difficult. The sheer force of our speed was increasing the pull of gravity, and gravity gets irritable when you make it work that hard. It fights back.
But, I instantly began to feel better. The pressure eased off, and I even began to feel comfortable. The bubble seat was quite cushy.
“What was that pill?” I asked Nate.
“ ‘Gravity Adjuster.’ It works by enveloping each of our molecules in a protective bath of neutrino barriers, the force of which pulsates with billions of micro-explosions that counteract the pull of gravity by—”
“Got it, Nate,” I said, which was a lie, but I’ve never been personally troubled by any need to tell the truth, as my parents have so often noted.
“So, we’re good, then?” I asked.
“We are,” Nate said. “But I can’t make the micro-explosions too powerful without endangering molecular bonds, so while we’re safe at Rocket Three, and even Rocket Two, it’s going to get uncomfortable again when Betsy goes to—”
“Rocket One!” Betsy yelled. Everything turned into light. Just . . . whooshing lights. Streams of color. Nothing made any sense. I had that tingling sensation of when you’ve been sitting in one place for too long, and you get up quickly and take a few steps and then your blood goes all whooshy and your body says, “Hey, whoa! I wasn’t ready for that!”
I was slammed literally into my seat, enveloped by the liquid, and I have to say that I no longer felt like I was floating in a tub of jelly; I felt like a doughnut being dipped into scalding hot coffee.
“Gahh,” I told Nate.
“The pressure is rather intense,” he agreed. “Luckily, it won’t last long. Now that we’ve left the Red Death Tea Society behind and can travel uninterrupted, we should be at the school in seven seconds. Make that six seconds now. Five. Four. Thr—”
And then we were attacked.
There was a look of surprise on Nate’s face, which is something I don’t see very often. He once told me he’s only truly surprised five times a year, on average, although he added that this calculation doesn’t account for what he calls the “Delphine Factor,” because my actions apparently don’t fit into mathematical formulas and I’m too difficult to predict. It’s one of the reasons he likes me.
“Gahh!” Nate said as our car suddenly veered sideways. There’d been an impact.
A big one.
“Piffle!” I said. A crack appeared in my window. Then a face was there, emerging from the brightly streaming colors. It was only there for a moment, like a ghost. Then it was gone and Betsy starting shaking and shuddering.
“Guh gug guh,” I said, trying to form words, but the car was shaking too violently and more faces were appearing outside the windows. They were evil, leering faces. With eager, malevolent smiles.
There was a distinct smell of tea.
The windshield began to break.
One thing I admire about Nate is that he remains calm during stressful situations. He doesn’t panic. We’ve gotten together to watch scary movies, like Hotel of a Hundred Zombies, and Motel of a Hundred Zombies, and Tree Fort of a Hundred Zombies, but I have to say that I don’t think I’ll be inviting him over to watch the recently released Tennis Court of a Hundred Zombies. I’ll most likely invite Liz, and Stine, and Ventura, because they know how to watch zombie movies. Whenever the zombies attack, Liz will shriek and throw marshmallows at the television, and Stine starts trembling and hugs her pillows, and of course Ventura gets up and runs around like there’s a zo
mbie in the room and she needs to escape. What I mean is, they act properly. Nate, on the other hand, begins to . . . analyze.
“Their best chance of survival is to flee,” he’ll say when the people open their hotel room to find a zombie waiting behind the door. Then he’ll show me some equations he’s scribbled on his pants, or on his hand, or that he’s doodled with his finger in our pizza sauce, despite how I’ve told him that pizza is sacred and that he could literally go to prison for life.
Or, other times he’ll say, “Since a zombie’s decaying flesh will emit a distinct odor, why aren’t these people constructing any mechanical sensory apparatus that could detect this scent, and therefore the zombies, from a safe distance? Failing that, why not just befriend a dog? Because a dog could sense the zombies from as far as five miles away, and even provide protection.”
Nate said this, incidentally, when Bosper was shivering beneath a blanket, meaning he would’ve been useless in any attack that didn’t specifically involve a zombie’s favorite blanket.
The point is, Nate doesn’t ever panic. It’s just not who he is.
“Gahh!” Nate said, totally panicking. It was up to me to take charge.
“Gahh!” I said, totally panicking.
Sometimes panic is like a virus. It can spread from person to person and suddenly there’s an epidemic, except instead of sneezing and coughing and wondering what to do with your tissues, you’re shrieking like a terrier hiding beneath a checkerboard blanket.
“This shouldn’t be possible!” Nate said. “Nobody can catch up with Betsy during Rocket One!” Despite Nate’s words, there was ample evidence to the contrary, meaning there was a man standing on the hood of our car, even though we were moving so fast that everything else was just a stream of frankly nauseating colors. The man was seven feet tall with a big muscle-bursting chest and cruel eyes. He had a sneering mouth and long black hair that was whipping around in the wind created by our speed. His arms were covered with horrible scars and intricate tattoos of teacups and tea packets. He was carrying a weird mechanical device about the size of a small microwave and . . . with his muscles straining against the pull of gravity . . . he twisted a dial on the side of it and then slammed it down onto Betsy’s hood so forcefully that it left a huge dent. It stuck there on her hood, despite how the roaring winds should’ve torn it away.
“What’s that?” I yelled. “Some sort of magnet?” To be entirely honest, I’d caught the panic virus in a bad way. I wanted to hug pillows and toss marshmallows and I wanted to run around in fright, but that’s very difficult to do when you’re strapped into a car seat.
“Oh,” Nate said. “Hmm. A magnet.” He’d calmed down. Entirely. He looked thoughtful and even . . . happy. Unfortunately, I myself did not catch the Happy Virus. I was still caught in the grip of the Panic Flu.
“You’re right,” Nate said. “They have to be doing this with magnets. You’re so smart!” He looked over to me with eyes that made me blush. I didn’t feel smart, right then. I felt foolish. But I also felt a flood of relief and I wasn’t panicked anymore, at least.
“I was right?” I said.
“Yes. You see, Betsy achieves Rocket One speed by oscillating back and forth between S-Pole and N-Pole, playing them off against each other to accelerate.”
“That’s very nice of her,” I said. I’m often at a loss to respond when Nate starts talking about science.
“What I mean is, it’s like magnets. Betsy is manipulating magnetic fields, or at least manipulating her place in them, fluctuating her atomic structure so that the earth’s magnetic field is acting as a slipstream accelerant.”
“Ooo!” I said. “I almost understood that one.” Being friends with Nate, listening to what he has to say, is like running the obstacle course in my backyard. The more I do it, the better I’m getting.
“But the Red Death Tea Society is using it against us,” Nate said. “They’re linking magnetic waves, coupling them, so that they’re stuck to us like glue.”
“So we can’t outrace them?” I asked. This was not good news. The cracks in Betsy’s windows were spreading outward. The faces appearing through the blur of the colors were staying longer, peering in through the windows. The man on our car hood was assembling another device.
“No,” Nate said. “We can’t outrace them.” His voice was grim, but almost even before he’d spoken, Betsy started laughing.
“Ha ha ha ha ha,” she said.
“Why’s she laughing?” I asked Nate.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Neat! This day is full of surprises!” It was at that moment that our neat day, full of surprises, became even neater and more surprising. My eyes went wide. Nate’s eyes went even wider. The eyes of the assassins from the Red Death Tea Society went widest of all.
“Rocket Zero,” Betsy said.
“Rocket Zero?” Nate said. “There is no Rocket Zero!”
But there was. Betsy, already going faster than I could possibly conceive, began accelerating. In fact, she was accelerating at an accelerated rate.
“Ha ha ha ha ha!” Betsy yelled. “Rocket Zero!” The man on the hood started flapping like a flag in a tornado, his feet anchored to the hood by the power of magnets. It did not look comfortable. He was thumping back and forth on his face and his butt. Meanwhile, the magnet-machine was sliding toward the edge of Betsy’s hood. The faces in the windows were becoming distorted.
“This is amazing!” Nate said. “Betsy is learning on her own! I hadn’t predicted this!”
“I do have a few secrets, Nate,” Betsy said. “Even from you.” She made it sound like a challenge.
“Are you using a photonic drive? A magnetic monopole to catalyze proton decay into a positron and a pi meson, harnessing the energy release and transforming it into acceleration?”
“Maaaaybe,” Betsy said.
“I’m impressed,” Nate said. Our whole car turned red and shivered. The faces in the windows were beginning to fall away, one by one, sucked away into the winds. The giant man on our hood was whisked off into the colorful void. Our speeds were inconceivable. We were whooshing through clouds. We were whooshing over treetops. My stomach was whooshy. I saw Polt Middle School, but we whooshed right past it. And then, there it was again, even though I’m pretty sure we hadn’t turned around. I tried not to think about how fast we must be going.
“Please prepare for impact,” Betsy said, which is never a line I favor hearing, though it’s becoming surprisingly commonplace in my life.
And then . . . impact.
We landed in the parking lot. Hard. Just before we hit, I could see that Betsy’s sides were smoking, like we were a comet, or a meteor. Betsy’s wheels touched concrete, caught for a second, and then the rear of the car came up over the front and we began to roll and bounce and crash and do a bunch of other things that I found to be disagreeable.
“I was clearly not prepared for impact!” I mentioned. Betsy kept bouncing. Tumbling. Rolling. Nate and I were being flung all over, and everything in the car was whooshing around us. Nate’s messenger bag, the one where he carries his science vials, now mostly empty, kept thumping off my face. And there were five bottles of mustard being flung around, and a pair of shoes, and several books, and some socks that smelled like they either should be in an emergency laundry basket or, even better, an incinerator.
“Piffle!” I yelped, on the third, fifth, and twenty-seventh bounces. I was shouting loud enough to be heard over the car crash, because I wanted my opinion to be known. There was a constant barrage of shuddering impacts. My body felt like it was buzzing. Like I was full of electricity. Like I was surrounded by fireflies. Like . . . hmmm. I actually was surrounded by fireflies. Tiny metal fireflies.
“What’s this?” I said, pointing to one of the fireflies during the thirty-first and thirty-second bounces.
“Barrier gnats,” Nate said. “Robots. Protecting us from impact.”
“And, how are they doing that?” I asked. I was bouncing all
over the car as Betsy rolled and tumbled, but I definitely had noted that I wasn’t being hurt. It was like an amusement park ride, where everything seems to be chaos, but you’re safe for the most part, except your stomach is questioning why you ate so much cotton candy.
“They’re like little catchers’ mitts,” Nate said. “Every time we almost smack into something, they catch us, and push us the other way.”
“Tiny helpers,” I said. “Got it.”
“Would you like to know how they work?” he asked.
“Gosh no,” I said, then, “C’mon, Nate!” because the car had finally rolled to a stop and the race was on to beat Maculte and the Red Death Tea Society to that hidden vial. I checked on Melville (my bee woke up when I shook her, looked around, and then went back to sleep), and then Nate and I crawled out of Betsy.
She was still laughing.
“That was fun!” she told me, even though she could clearly see that my hair was a mess and that I’d squished an entire bottle of mustard against my leg. Nate, in the past week, had been running an experiment on mustards, and there were several squeeze bottles in the back of the car. Apparently, the whole of his experiment was, “Which mustard tastes better?” That sounds like a rational bit of research, but I was relatively certain the experiment would turn weird. That’s just Nate.
“Are you okay?” I asked Betsy. The cracks in her windshield were already fixing themselves, and the dents were popping back out into proper shape. That’s one of the benefits of being a talking car made of unstable molecules.
“I’m fine,” Betsy said. “But you have mustard on your leg.”
“I do.” There was no denying it.
“Mustard?” Nate asked. “Is that my mustard?”
“I rarely carry my own bottles of mustard, Nate, so, yes . . . I’d say it was probably your mustard.”
“This could be a problem,” he said.
I told him, “There are these wonderful devices called ‘washing machines,’ Nate. I bet they could solve this ‘mustard stains on my pants’ dilemma.” I was already running toward the school. Luckily, it wasn’t in session right then, so we were unlikely to be disturbed, except for a few of the janitors.
