The Worst Night Ever

by Dave Barry

  It was definitely the best speech I ever gave. I could see the two guys thinking about it and realizing I was right. With two of them, including their leader, down, their best bet was to just get out of there. They looked at each other and nodded. The guy holding Taylor let her go. She ran over to where Suzana and I were standing.

  The two guys went over to the leader. They grabbed him under his arms, picked him up, and dragged him over to the first truck. They lifted him into the cab and closed the door. Then they helped the other guy, who was conscious but really woozy, into the second truck.

  The two guys, hurrying now, went to the driver’s sides of the trucks and got in. It hit me then: they were going to leave. We had stopped them. Actually, to be honest, Taylor had stopped them, and I knew she was never, ever going to let me forget it. But I didn’t care. The point was, we had won.

  The men started the engines.

  It was over.

  Then I heard a third engine, behind me.

  I turned around. A car, headlights out, was coming, fast. As it got closer I saw it was a black Jeep Wrangler, all tricked out, with huge tires and a Miami Heat logo on the hood.

  It skidded to a stop right in front of us. The doors opened fast.

  Out jumped Frank, Nick, and Troy Bevin.

  Frank Bevin was by the trucks, talking to the two guys who didn’t get knocked out by Taylor. He was very unhappy with them.

  I was by the bushes with Suzana and Taylor. Nick and Troy stood a few yards away.

  “You guys run,” I whispered. “Maybe you can get help.”

  “I’m staying,” said Suzana.

  “Me too,” said Taylor.

  The truth was, even if they did run, they probably wouldn’t have gotten away from the Bevin brothers, who were staring at us. Troy was staring especially hard at Suzana.

  “You should have listened to us,” he said. “You made a big mistake. A really big mistake.”

  She shook her head. “My mistake was not realizing how disgusting you two are.”

  Troy was about to say something else when his father came over. He didn’t even look at us.

  “Okay,” he said. “These idiots screwed it up, so we’re going to have to do this ourselves. Troy, you’ll be in the right-hand truck. When I tell you, you’ll open those cages as fast as you can and dump the animals out. Be careful, and wear these.” He handed Troy a pair of gloves that he’d gotten from one of the other men.

  “Nick, you’ll be in the other truck. Get on the right side. You see the latch handle?”

  Nick looked at the truck with the ant container and nodded.

  “When Troy’s almost done, I’ll give you the signal, and you pull that handle. That’ll dump the ants. You stay up in the truck, out of the way, got it?”

  Nick nodded again.

  “As soon as they’re all dumped out I’ll honk the Jeep horn, and the men will drive the trucks out of here. You two stay in the back. I’ll follow in the Jeep. When we get to 152nd Street, we’ll all stop and you two can get back in the Jeep. Got it?”

  Troy and Nick nodded. Then Nick pointed to us and said, “What about them?”

  Frank Bevin answered without looking at us. “What about them?”

  “Well,” said Nick, “I mean they know about…” He waved his arms toward the trucks. “All this.”

  “Yes,” said Frank. “But in five minutes, all this will be gone. So you’ll have three kids—including a known thief—telling some crazy story about one of the most respected men in the community. I’m not worried about them.” Now, for the first time, he looked at us, the way a man looks at a bug. “Although,” he said, “if I were them, I’d start running.”

  “He can’t run!” said Taylor, pointing at me. “He’s hurt! He can’t even walk!”

  “How unfortunate for him,” said Frank, turning away. “Okay, boys. Let’s do this.” He walked over and said something to the two drivers. Troy headed toward the near truck, with the cages. Nick headed for the truck with the ant container. They weren’t worried about us anymore.

  “We need to get out of here before they let those things loose,” I said.

  “You can’t walk!” said Taylor.

  “The scooter,” I said.

  “What scooter?” said Taylor.

  “It’s Jon’s,” I said. “I rode it here. It’s in those bushes. Maybe we can all squeeze on it.” I started to hobble toward it, but Suzana didn’t move.

  “Suzana,” I said, “we can’t stay here.”

  She was staring at the trucks. Nick and Troy were climbing up into the truck backs. The two drivers were climbing into the cabs. Frank was heading toward the Jeep.

  “We can’t just let them win!” she said. She looked around, then picked up a rock.

  “Suzana!” I said. “That’s not going to stop them!”

  “What about this?” said Taylor. She was pulling something from the pocket of her hoodie. It looked like a stick of dynamite, a red thing about a foot long with a bunch of words printed on it.

  “What’s that?” said Suzana.

  “An emergency flare,” she said. “I found it in the truck. I was going to use it to fight them, before I found the fire extinguisher.”

  Suzana dropped the rock. “How do you work it?” she said.

  Frank was standing next to the Jeep. “Troy!” he shouted. “You ready?”

  Troy gave the thumbs-up. He was up in the back of the right-hand truck, standing next to the cage with the Komodo dragon inside. On his other side were a bunch of smaller cages, ready to be unloaded.

  “Nick!” shouted Frank. “Ready?”

  Nick nodded. He was standing in the back of the other truck, next to the ant container. He had his hand on the right-hand latch handle, ready to pull.

  We were only a few dozen feet from the zoo fence, but Frank could yell as loud as he wanted. Nobody at the Killer Kritter party could hear him over the sound of the crowd noise and the DJ, who was now blasting another old Halloween-y song, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”

  “All right, Troy,” shouted Frank. “Let them go!”

  Troy leaned over and started to undo the latch on the Komodo dragon cage.

  That’s when the scooter came bursting out of the bushes, headlight on, horn beeping.

  I was driving. Taylor was sitting behind me. Sitting behind her was Suzana, holding up the flare like it was the Olympic torch. It was burning with a bright reddish-orange light, and there was a lot of smoke billowing out.

  I swerved close to Frank, who grabbed for the scooter but missed. He started yelling and running after us as I swerved toward the truck with Troy in it. Suzana faked like she was going to throw the flare at him. He flinched and jumped back. I kept going. Now Troy was out of the truck and chasing us, too. I swerved toward the truck with Nick in it. I stopped the scooter right in front of him. He was standing with his hand on the latch handle, looking confused. I glanced back. Frank and Troy were almost on us.

  “GO!” yelled Suzana, and at the same time, threw the flare at Nick.

  Nick, who is very athletic, saw it coming and reacted in time. He jumped to his right, hanging on to keep from falling out of the truck. The flare sailed past him, past the ant container, and into the truck cargo area. So Nick would have been fine, except for one problem.

  The thing he was hanging on to was the latch handle.

  Nick’s weight pulled it down, unlatching the container door. With Nick still holding on, it fell open. Out poured the contents: a big pile of dirt and several million really unhappy siafu ants.

  They flew through the air and landed, like raindrops with really strong little jaws, not just on Nick, but also on Troy and Frank, who arrived just as the scooter pulled away. More ants swarmed up from the dirt pile. That’s when the screaming started.

  I drove a little way and turned the scooter around so we could see what was happening. This wasn’t what we had expected to happen. If we had tried fourteen million times on purpose to make this happen,
we would have failed fourteen million times. We were just hoping to hassle the Bevins, and draw somebody’s attention with the flare. We hadn’t planned for the ants to get loose. They were swarming on the Bevins, who were screaming and brushing wildly at their legs and arms as they ran away from the dirt pile.

  Meanwhile the ant truck was now on fire. Smoke and flames were shooting out of the cargo area. The driver jumped out his side, ran around to the other side, and pulled out one of the guys Taylor had clonked. They staggered over to the Jeep, where they were joined by the two guys from the other truck. The four of them got in the Jeep and roared away. They didn’t seem too concerned about the Bevins.

  Flames from the truck were shooting toward the sky. In the distance I heard sirens.

  The Bevins were still screaming and flailing. They were on their feet and moving. They were going to survive. But they were definitely in a tremendous amount of pain.

  I admit I smiled as I twisted the scooter throttle.

  Here’s what happened after we left:

  First the fire department arrived. They put out the truck fire, but they also noticed the ant pile and the Bevins, who by then were begging for medical attention. The firefighters called in paramedics to take care of the Bevins, and some guys who sprayed stuff on the ant pile, which took care of most of the ants.

  Of course the firefighters also noticed the other truck and the cages full of weird animals. They figured it must have something to do with the zoo, so they they called some zoo people, who got there quickly, since they were right next door.

  The zoo people were very interested in the animals on the truck. They called the police and other agencies, so pretty soon there was a major investigation going on. It led quickly to the four guys in the Jeep, and to Frank Bevin, and from there to some other very important people who suddenly needed very expensive lawyers.

  I’ll skip over a bunch of boring legal stuff that happened after that. Basically, Frank Bevin is in big trouble and is almost definitely going to prison. Nick and Troy probably won’t go to prison, but they’re no longer at Coral Cove High. They’re attending some kind of disciplinary school in someplace cold—I think maybe Maine. It doesn’t have a football team.

  Frank Bevin’s MegaDade project is definitely not going to happen. The zoo expansion is.

  Speaking of the zoo, it’s now the new home of the animals that were on the truck. The Komodo dragon, which is a lot bigger than the one the zoo already had, has become one of the most popular exhibits. They named it Zevon.

  Jon Aibel is back with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He even got promoted. He’s still friends with Taylor and me and sometimes visits us, only now he comes in by the front door. Taylor is still in love with him, although she accepted the fact that she’ll probably have to wait another ten or fifteen years before the timing is right. Jon did promise her that, if they ever come to town and it’s okay with my parents, he’ll take her to see Snot House.

  Speaking of Taylor, she’s still incredibly annoying. Maybe even more annoying than before, because now, on top of everything else, she can point out that she was the hero who saved the day, and she points this out a lot. But the truth is, she did save the day. And she believed me when hardly anybody else did. So even though she’s annoying, I have to say that I’m glad she’s my sister. Most of the time.

  As for me, I had a lot to explain when I got home Halloween night looking like a blood-covered zombie, and my parents discovered that the sulky, pouty teenager they’d been communicating with through my bedroom door was not me but Dylan Schweitzer. My mom yelled at me all the way to the emergency room, where I had to get a tetanus shot and stitches in my foot and crutches, although basically I was okay. While we were at the hospital the police showed up, which was good, because the police backed up what Taylor and I were saying. It took a while for all the details to come out, and my parents were really upset about certain things, like the part about Taylor in the truck. But once they had the whole story, they were pretty proud of us, and I think they felt guilty about believing I was a thief. So now that it’s all over, things are pretty good between me and my parents, if you don’t count the fact that I’m still doing bad in Trigonometry.

  Things are also pretty good between Suzana and me. We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend or anything, but we’re definitely friends again, maybe better friends than we were. And I think someday we could maybe be boyfriend and girlfriend, which is an interesting thing to think about. I’m getting to know more kids at Coral Cove, which feels a lot friendlier these days, now that the Bevins are gone.

  The other day before school I was in the courtyard with Matt and Victor, and The Stinger walked by us and stopped. Usually this is a bad thing. I automatically looked down to see what dress code violation I was guilty of. But instead of giving me a detention, she said, “Mr. Palmer, are you staying out of trouble?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Totally.”

  “Good,” she said. “Only three and a half years to go.”

  I won’t say she smiled then, because I don’t believe that The Stinger is physically capable of smiling. But for just a fraction of a second there, she looked a tiny bit less unhappy than usual.

  I think it’s going to be a pretty good year.

  DAVE BARRY is a Pulitzer Prize−winning author of more than two dozen books, including The Worst Class Trip Ever. Along with Ridley Pearson, he is the coauthor of the Peter and the Starcatchers series and Science Fair. Dave, his wife, Michelle, and their family live in Miami, Florida.