Текст книги "Attack of the BULLIES"

Автор книги: Michael Buckley

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

TOP SECRET DOSSIER

CODE NAME: THIRD DEGREE

REAL NAME: AMOS “JUNIOR” CASTO

YEARS ACTIVE: 2001–07

CURRENT OCCUPATION: CEO OF HAWAIIAN TROPIC SUNTAN LOTION CORP

HISTORY: AMOS’S PALE SKIN WAS

HIGHLY SUSCEPTIBLE TO SUNBURN.

FIVE MINUTES OUTSIDE WITHOUT

APPLYING AN INCH-THICK LAYER

OF SUNSCREEN AND HE WOULD TURN

INTO A FLAMING-HOT TOMATO. SOME

STUDIES SHOWED THAT STANDING

NEXT TO THE BOY WAS ENOUGH

FOR A PERSON TO CONTRACT A

VICIOUS RED BURN. MOST OF THE

SKIN DAMAGE OCCURRED ON THE

LOWER HALVES OF HIS ARMS AND

LEGS AND ON HIS NECK, DUE TO

THE SHORT-SLEEVED SHIRTS

AND CUTOFF JEANS HE WORE

EVERY DAY.

UPGRADE: THIRD DEGREE’S BURNS

WERE ENHANCED SO THAT THEY

GENERATED HEAT, ALLOWING HIM

TO START RAGING BONFIRES

WHENEVER NEEDED.

The NERDS and the principal dragged Agent Brand into Marty Mozzarella’s, which was mercifully deserted for the night. Brand still wore the big mouse head and was groaning indignantly.

The principal waved the children a safe distance away. “He’s angry. I’m going to take the head off and then the gag, so be careful of his teeth.”

Brand blinked hard against the restaurant’s harsh fluorescent lighting. As soon as the gag came out, so did a tirade of potty language not appropriate for print. Ruby waited patiently for him to stop, but there seemed to be no end in sight. When he didn’t calm down, she took the gag from the principal and stuffed it back into Brand’s mouth.

“Sorry, boss, but we have to act fast. Here’s what’s happening. Ms. Holiday has built a playground just like ours.”

“Identical,” Matilda said.

“She’s assembled a team of kids just like us,” Ruby said.

“They even have upgrades,” Jackson said.

“They call themselves the BULLIES,” Duncan said.

“Her science team created a time machine,” Ruby said. “She’s already erased one of our members, a kid named Flinch, who you won’t remember because he never existed, and now she’s probably going after the four of us.”

“You mean three,” the principal said.

“Huh?”

“There’s only three of you on the team, unless you’re counting Heathcliff, but he’s just helping.”

Ruby looked around at her friends. “Where’s Duncan?”

“Who?” Matilda asked.

“Duncan Dewey! Agent Gluestick!”

The others gave her the increasingly familiar You’re going crazy look.

“Aaargh!” Ruby shouted, then turned her attention back to Brand. “Your girlfriend just erased Duncan Dewey! I know you don’t remember him, but he was a really nice guy.”

Brand moaned something unintelligible through his gag.

“Shush!” Ruby snapped. “I know you want to sit up at your stupid cabin and scare away the wildlife with your oboe, but you might be able to reach whatever is left of Ms. Holiday, so you’re helping whether you want to or not.”

Ruby looked to the principal.

He nodded. “Yeah, what she said.”

Ruby removed the handkerchief from Brand’s mouth. The former spy took a long, frustrated breath. “Well, I guess that’s settled.”

Ruby smiled.

“Heathcliff, you’re on!” the principal shouted.

Heathcliff raced into the room, arms filled with papers and a calculator. He came to a screeching halt in front of Mr. Brand. He peered into the former spy’s shaggy face.

“What happened to him?”

Brand growled and Heathcliff jumped back.

“Where are we with our time machine?” the principal asked as he untied Brand’s hands.

“Well, first of all, whoever designed Ms. Holiday’s time machine was a real knucklehead. I mean, it’s genius, but every time she turns it on, it threatens to destroy the universe. It’s obvious that it’s based on the Decoyer Loop Universe theory, which is like so last year, but—”

“Can you turn the science down to one and the English up to ten?” Jackson asked.

“Yeah, sorry,” Heathcliff said. “Basically, her time machine rips a huge hole in space-time, which could have some nasty side effects. Black holes. Supernovas. Plus, it’s a dirty technology and bad for the environment. I threw out her entire design and started over with a pet theory of mine. I have always believed there are tiny tears in the space-time continuum—little dimples, if you can imagine. Turns out I’m right. They’re all over the place, and we can stretch one so it’s big enough to travel through. It’s much safer, and we don’t need a huge machine.”

“So how do we find one of these holes?” Matilda asked.

“Already done,” Heathcliff said. “There’s one right here in this restaurant.”

He gestured to the multicolored ball pit at the center of the room. A tangle of tubes connected a huge pulsating engine to the pit. “I’ve attached it to a low-grade nuclear power source. I’m charging the battery cells now. It should be ready soon.”

“OK, I know I’m the C-minus member of this team, but even with a time machine, how are we going to find her?” Jackson asked. “Miss Information and her toad squad could have gone anywhere. Or ‘anywhen.’”

“She allowed herself to be photographed during her trip to August 16, 1987. Something she and her team did there erased … what was his name again?”

“Flinch,” Ruby said.

“Yes, Flinch. All we have to do is go back to that day and stop her plan and we get Flinch and Gluestick back in one shot,” Heathcliff explained.

“I can’t do this,” Brand said.

Ruby turned to him, fully prepared to unleash every ounce of her anger and frustration. His broken heart was not going to get in the way of her being born. She’d put him back in the mouse suit if he wouldn’t cooperate.

“… unless you let me shave,” Brand continued. “If I’m going to stop my ex from ruining the world, I want to look hot.”

While the remnants of her team waited for the time machine to boot up, Ruby sat at an arcade game and searched police records for news of her disappearance from home. What she found was worse than she’d imagined. Her mother and father had appeared on the nightly news, Grandpa Saul had done an interview with the Washington Post, and her cousins had built a Find Ruby Peet website. Her disappearance had gone viral, and hundreds of people were searching all over Arlington for her. She couldn’t stand knowing the suffering she was putting her family through. She felt like crying, remembering the last conversation she had with her mom and dad.

But then she found a newspaper article with a photograph of her house. Parked on the street was a familiar black car and behind the steering wheel was the same Secret Service agent who had taken her to see the president. The principal was right. They were watching her house, probably tapping the phones, and waiting to pounce if they got so much as a hint that Ruby was reaching out.

At that moment, she would’ve been happy to open up any drawer her nieces and nephews wanted to explore. She would let them tear apart her socks and ignore her TV remote instructions and build forts in her bedroom with filthy bricks. She wanted nothing more than to watch her big, loud, obnoxious family turn the house into a complete and total mess. Especially now, when there was a good chance she could be wiped out of existence at any moment. Then they wouldn’t be searching far and wide for her—they’d forget her completely. Somehow that was even worse.

“We’re ready,” Heathcliff said, approaching her cautiously.

“Brand?”

“He just finished. I wonder if I had forty minutes with a barber, manicurist, and a tailor if I would look that handsome.”

“It’s really hard for you. Isn’t it?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Not having a family,” she said.

Heathcliff’s shoulders slumped, and he nodded. “Sometimes I feel like I’m a boat on the ocean and I can’t find land no matter which direction I sail.”

Ruby looked back at an image of her family’s worried faces on the news. She didn’t know what kind of life she might have in the future, but if she could fix all her problems, she’d never complain about a crowded house again.

The team gathered at the ball pit. Ruby’s glands ached, and she looked around warily. “Where’s Matilda?” Ruby asked.

Jackson, Heathcliff, the principal, and Brand just stared at her.

“Not another one!” Ruby exclaimed. “We have to do this fast. Let’s move!”

Heathcliff adjusted some dials and checked a pressure valve. “One of us has to stay here and keep an eye on this machine. It needs a lot of power, some of which I’m pulling off the local grid. If the lights go out, our connection will be cut and we could be lost in time permanently.”

“And who is that going to be?” the principal said.

Everyone looked at Heathcliff.

“Me? No way!”

“Heathcliff!” Ruby cried.

“My life is at risk, too, right? If anyone should stay, it’s one of the grown-ups. She’s after team members, not staff!”

“Hodges, I need the most capable people on this mission,” the principal said. “Ruby and Jackson have upgrades. Brand is a trained secret agent. I was a Golden Gloves winner growing up in New Jersey.”

“And my argument is that you should stay and watch the machine,” Heathcliff said.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Of all the people associated with this team, Miss Information has the least grudge against you. If she even bothers to prevent your birth, she’s going to do it last.”

The principal growled. “Aargh! He’s right. Brand, I hate this job. I need to crush some skulls! I can’t remember the last time I gave someone a concussion! Once this is over, I’m resigning. I’ll go back to the kitchen. I miss my spatula!”

Brand looked at Heathcliff. “Looks like you’re along for the ride, kid. How does this machine work?”

Heathcliff beamed. “All you have to do is jump in.”

Brand eyed the multicolored balls. “Of course,” he groaned.

Using his cane, he crawled into the center of the balls.

“Get down in there,” Heathcliff said.

“Is there no end to my humiliation?” Brand fell onto his back and let the balls swallow him.

“Looks like it works,” Jackson said.

“I was a little worried he’d be sucked into a miniature black hole. If so, his entire body would have been crushed by an intense gravity. And we’d have had to watch the whole thing,” Heathcliff confessed.

“Get going while you still can, Heathcliff,” Ruby ordered.

Heathcliff snatched his backpack and leaped into the pit. A moment later he was gone, too.

Ruby’s head suddenly felt as if someone had hooked a bicycle pump to it and was filling it full of air. “All right, Jackson. You’re up.”

“Who?” the principal asked.

Ruby whipped around, looking for her teammate and his amazing braces, but he was gone. If she didn’t want to be next, she had to act fast. She dove under the balls and suddenly felt as if she were sinking into a huge Jell-O mold. There was a shimmering feeling to the air and a coppery taste in her mouth like she was sucking on a penny, and then—BAM!—she was gone.

The trip felt a little like the times she had dropped into the Playground from her school locker. But this tube seemed to be made of light and stars that branched off like the veins in a human body. The tunnels led to endless possibilities; one might take her to the dawn of man, another to Earth’s final days. There were millions of destinations. She hoped she’d stay on course. Things would go from bad to worse if she landed in the time of dinosaurs.

Suddenly, she hit something. It was hard and cold and smelled a lot like pizza. She pulled her head out of the balls. Brand and Heathcliff were waiting by the side of the pit, but the restaurant looked exactly as it did a moment ago.

“It didn’t work,” she said. “It was supposed to take us to the street that Miss Information and the BULLIES arrived on in 1987.”

“No, it worked,” Brand said. He pointed to a table full of kids happily munching on pizza. They wore faded bell-bottom jeans and platform shoes. They looked like extras from a TV show her dad loved called The Brady Bunch. At one table, the kids wore tie-dyed T-shirts and pants covered in rhinestones. She’d seen clothes like these in her grandmother’s closet. Oddly enough, the restaurant looked exactly the same as it did in her time, except the video games had been replaced by pinball machines.

“This is what people wore in 1987?” she asked.

“We’re not in 1987. We’re in 1977,” Heathcliff said.

“1977? Why did you send us so far back?”

“That was my idea,” Brand said. “A girl with superallergies, a boy genius, and a spy with a bum leg are no match for five superpowered kids and a crazy woman. We need help from kids who know how to handle these kinds of situations. Unfortunately, the NERDS team of 1987 was trapped in an ice prison by Dr. Frostbite that summer. So we’re going to recruit some new teammates—namely, the greatest NERDS team ever assembled. The first one.”

“You mean Four Eyes, Macramé, Ghost, Beanpole, and Static Cling?” Ruby cried as her heart did a backflip. She had studied the case files; she knew everything about every agent who had ever been in NERDS. If there was a team that could help them with the BULLIES, it was the NERDS of 1977.

Rupert P. Breckinridge III looked at his teammates and grimaced. They were a collection of sharp elbows, bony knees, runny noses, scabs, and insecurity. If their job was to protect the world, then the world was in serious trouble.

“Is there no better way to get into this facility? This is insanity!” Special Director Preston shouted after a tube had deposited him into a leather chair.

Rupert had been in that tube himself, and he knew it wasn’t a fun ride, nor was cramming into the locker to get to it.

Preston retrieved a shoe that had come off during the trip, then took off his horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed them on his pant leg. One of his pens was leaking in the pocket of his white short-sleeved work shirt. A piece of toilet paper was stuck to the back of the poor man’s pant leg. Rupert sighed. The boss was a bigger nerd than his agents.

“In three weeks, the school above this facility will open and you will begin attending classes with the rest of the children. When that day comes, the five of you will be officially activated and sent on missions, so we need to double-time your training. Let’s get back to our karate practice.” He took out a book titled Karate for Beginners and flipped through its pages.

Rupert wondered, not for the first time, why Preston had been put in charge of a group of superpowered agents. Sure, he was a spy—but most of his work had been in code breaking. He had no practical mission experience, no hand-to-hand combat training, and his karate knowledge came from watching Hong Kong Phooey cartoons.

“Aww, man!” came a predictable whine from Carmello Gotti, an Italian kid so pudgy he might have been made out of dough. Rupert had heard that before being recruited onto the team, Carmello hadn’t so much as thrown a ball. Now he had special implants in his gigantic round hairdo that fired massive blasts of static electricity. “Can’t we do something else? My parents are getting suspicious of all the bruises.”

“No, they’re not. They assume what everyone else assumes—that Billy Dunkleman is beating you up again,” came the sharp, sarcastic voice of May Price. Her wit was almost as fast as her fingers, which were supercharged with special gloves, allowing her to knit anything she could imagine out of yarn. Preston called her Agent Macramé.

“Burn!” Mikey Buckley said as he burst into laughter. He was as skinny as a cornstalk and had a brain for technology. He still hadn’t chosen a code name he considered cool enough but was toying around with “Fantastic Boy.”

“You guys are mean,” Minnie Dupont said. The tiny girl pressed a button on her jacket and vanished. Agent Ghost had a very cool power, and as far as Rupert could tell, she was the only one with a skill that could be valuable for spying. Unfortunately, she was brutally shy.

“People! We need to focus,” Director Preston said meekly, but he was ignored while the agents argued for another ten minutes.

Rupert sighed. The NERDS were never going to become a team. They didn’t even like one another, and all of them had scored zero on the self-confidence meter. It was a shame, really. When Rupert was recruited, he was sure the group would change his life. But it looked like he was headed back to the mundane world he came from, the one where he was chased home everyday by Matt Phaltz, the psychopath who enjoyed ripping the waistbands out of Rupert’s Fruit of the Looms. Well, Rupert liked his waistbands. He refused to go back!

What they needed was a James Bond type, a leader, someone the others could respect. If Preston couldn’t motivate the team, Rupert would do it himself. He flipped down one of the many lenses on his special glasses and a blast of white energy shot out of his eyes, causing a nearby wall to crumble.

“QUIET!” he shouted. “You kids are the most intolerable, unprofessional, frustrating, lazy, and cranky dweebs I have ever met. Mr. Preston has tried everything—pep talks, being your friend, being your enemy, being a drill instructor, begging, bribery—and none of it has worked. You bicker endlessly. You skip training sessions. You aren’t even sure how to use your gadgets. You treat this headquarters like it’s some kind of … some kind of playground!”

Preston blinked. “Yeah!” he cried.

Rupert pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and looked around. “You might be perfectly happy to go out on a mission and get yourselves killed, but I have no plans to join you. So here’s the deal: Take this seriously or quit and go back to being the pathetic, bullied misfits you were six weeks ago.”

The threat seemed to have the desired affect. The thought of having to return to their normal lives, without the gadgets, was more than the NERDS could imagine. Each one tried to stand a little taller.

“Goodness gracious!” Preston shouted when he discovered his ruined shirt. “Let’s take five while I find something else to wear.”

He dashed off, leaving the children alone.

“OK, he’s useless,” Rupert said. “So if we’re going to learn to fight, it’s up to us. Each one of us has a skill, and if we work together, we can be unstoppable. That’s why they chose us. So let’s get back to training! Who’s with me?”

Rupert could have heard a pin drop.

Minnie raised her hand. “Um, I gotta get going.”

“Yeah, me too,” added May. “The Gong Show is on in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ve got work to do on Benjamin,” Mikey said.

“Are you still working on that stupid calculator?” May asked.

The boy grew defensive. “It’s called a computer, and someday it will be a huge asset. I’m programming it with all the knowledge of one of America’s greatest spies—Benjamin Franklin. It’s going to talk, and think, and help with mission reports. I’ve already figured out how to make it fly!”

He pressed a button and a massive machine at the far end of the room let out a chorus of screaming gears as it rose off the floor: one inch, then two, then three—then it came crashing to the floor.

“Way to go, Fantastic Boy,” Carmello quipped.

The team shuffled toward the exit tubes.

Rupert took one of the tubes up to his locker. The hallway was empty except for a crew of janitors screwing in lightbulbs and touching up paint jobs in preparation for the first day of school. He was glad something was almost ready.

“Hey, Four Eyes!” a voice shouted the moment Rupert stepped outside the school.

Rupert cringed. It was Matt Phaltz!

He took off running without looking back but could hear Phaltz and his friends running close behind. They were shouting and laughing as they chased him down the street.

“Leave me alone,” he cried, but they ignored his plea. He made a sharp turn at the corner and was nearly home when he tripped over a garden hose someone had left lying on the sidewalk. He fell hard, bruising his knees and wrists, and before he knew it, the bullies were on top of him, trying to de-pants him right there in the middle of the street.

“C’mon, guys! Leave me alone,” he begged. The thought occurred to him to flip his laser lense down on his glasses and blast the bullies to kingdom come, but he and the others had vowed not to use their gadgets on civilians. It would blow their cover, and their devices were too dangerous. But that didn’t mean he had to take a beating.

He pulled his fist back and swung. Matt Phaltz went sprawling across the sidewalk with a puffy eye. The only problem was, Rupert had missed. His fist had never connected with the bully.

Dumbfounded, Rupert looked around just in time to see Phaltz’s toadie Mitch crumple to the ground, followed by Ty and Paulie—all at the hands of a nerdy girl with glasses and poofy yellow hair, a redheaded kid who was probably half the size of Phaltz, and a man in a black tuxedo, holding a cane.

The girl smiled. “I hope you don’t mind, Four Eyes. I’m allergic to bullies.”

“Who are you?” Rupert asked.

“Ruby Peet, and let me say what an honor it is to meet one of the greatest members of NERDS that ever lived. I’ve read all your files and—”

Rupert flipped the laser lens on his glasses and prepared to fight. His secret was out, and clearly these enemy agents had been sent to kill him and the others. “I don’t know who you are, but you won’t take me alive,” Rupert said. He’d heard someone say that on an episode of S.W.A.T. It seemed appropriate.

“We’re not here to hurt you, Rupert,” the boy said.

Rupert could feel the heat in his glasses as his laser prepared to fire. “I asked you who you are. Someone better start talking!”

The man hobbled forward. “My name is Agent Alexander Brand, and I’m the director of the National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society from the twenty-first century.”

“The twenty-first century!”

“Some bad guys are coming and only you can help us stop them,” Ruby said.

“How can I help you? I don’t get activated for three weeks!”

“We need you, pal,” their redheaded friend said. “And we need your team—the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen.”