Brainboy and the Deathmaster (15 page)

Darryl felt all eyes on him. Though Nina looked
worried, everyone else looked kind of jealous, and despite last night’s conversation he couldn’t help feeling pleased at being singled out this way.

Down on L, Snoodles had just harvested a fresh blue freckle from a newly mixed batch of G-17. Mr. Masterly took it into Accel and invited Darryl to join him there.

“What do you think?” he said. “Gamma rays?”

Darryl thought for a minute and shook his head. “I’d bombard it with beta rays, sir. Should be cleaner.”

He was right. In an hour they had several cc’s of G-9¼ and several cc’s of G-7¼.

“What dilution?” Mr. Masterly asked.

“I’d say about ten to one, sir.”

“Saline solution?”

“Mm.”

After diluting the new compound, Mr. Masterly went into Bio and set four cages, each containing a crusty old white rat, on the central table. He left one rat alone, as a control, and injected the other three with the newly split G-17. The rats weren’t particularly cooperative, so it was well after nine o’clock before Darryl got back up to S.

“Come in,” Nina said when he knocked on her door.

Sitting up in bed, still fully dressed, she paused her movie as he plunked down in one of the velvet chairs. But she didn’t speak.

“He wanted help,” Darryl said.

“Doing what?”

“Dividing G-17. What are you watching?”

“
Big Night under the Big Top.
Dividing it?”

“Just an idea of mine.”

“What happened to training for the chimney climb?”

“I’m sorry. We could start tomorrow. But … Nina?”

“Yeah?”

“BJ’s the one I wanted to call the other night. He and his mom were so great to me. If he gets through again, will you tell him where I am?”

“You think I know where we are?”

“You know what I mean. Tell him we’re in this place where we can’t call out.”

“Oh. Okay, I guess.”

“And you’ll do lunch duty tomorrow?”

“Uh-uh. It’s against the rules to do two days in a row.”

Darryl sighed, looking down at the carpet.

“What’s wrong?”

“Mr. Masterly’s leaving tonight. He’s got a meeting at MasterTech in the morning. But he said he’d be back by lunchtime, and I bet he goes straight to L to check the rats.”

“What rats?”

“We injected some rats.”

“So?”

“I can’t do lunch duty.”

“Because you’ll freeze up if the red light comes on?”

“And he’ll know I’m off the vitamins.”

“Then you better not freeze up.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Why does the flashing red light bug you so much?”

But letting his mind slide off in that direction was too dangerous. So he just sat there like a lump.

Suddenly Nina was kneeling before him, her eyes peering into his through the thick lenses of her glasses. “Tell me, Darryl,” she said.

When he still didn’t speak, she took his hands.

“Tell me.”

It felt funny, her holding his hands. Hers were kind of hard, callused from gymnastics, but they were nice and warm. He swallowed.

“It’s all my fault,” he said.

“What’s all your fault?”

When he didn’t answer again, she let go of him and went into the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. He took a drink.

“Thanks,” he said.

She knelt down and took his hands again. “Now tell me.’’ She smiled at him. “Come on, Darryl. Don’t be a wuss.”

Darryl’s heart felt like one of those rats trying to
avoid the needle. “That’s just what he used to say,” he whispered.

“Your brother Jason?”

Darryl nodded. “He said it … that night.”

“What night?”

Darryl opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“Come on, Darryl,” Nina coaxed. “Tell me. Tell me about that night.”

“W
hy do you always have to be such a wuss, Dare? It gets embarrassing being your brother.”

“I’m not a wuss.”

“Go on, Dare, it’s fun. I’d sleep up there with you if I could get up the darn ladder.”

The three boys were lounging around the living room of their grandparents’ house after a chicken-potpie dinner. Darryl was in his grandfather’s easy chair. His brother, Jason, was sprawled on the sofa where Darryl had slept the night before. Their cousin Barry, who was eighteen, a year older than Jason, was sprawled on the other sofa, his leg in a cast. He’d wrapped his parents’ Subaru around a streetlamp the night of his senior prom.

“The only bad thing about that tree hut’s the darn birds,” Barry said. “They start hootin’ and hollerin’ at about five A.M.”

“Dare won’t mind that,” Jason said. “He’s used to that nerdy GameMaster, blippin’ and beepin’ all the time.”

“It’s not nerdy,” Darryl muttered. “If you ask me, you’re the wuss. Scared of Old Man Truman’s ghost.”

“Yeah, right,” Jason said with a snort. “I just want to
get a decent night’s sleep, that’s all.”

“But this morning you said you liked the tree hut.”

Jason yawned. “I don’t know about you, Barry, but I’m about ready to hit the hay.”

“It’s not fair!” Darryl cried.

“What’s all the ruckus in there?” Uncle Frank called from the front porch.

“Just Dare being a wuss, as usual,” Jason called back.

Darryl heard the screen door and the creaking floorboards but couldn’t see who’d come inside till his plump aunt and even plumper uncle entered the glow of the kerosene lantern set on the mantelpiece under the needlepoint Kirby Family Tree. They’d all ferried over here from Seattle the day before to celebrate his grandmother’s sixty-fifth birthday: he and Jason and their parents and Barry and his parents. His grandparents had retired to Bainbridge Island a couple of years ago, buying a house from a family that had outgrown it. There were only three bedrooms, and last night Darryl had camped out in the living room with Barry while Jason had slept in the tree hut built by the previous owners’ kids. This afternoon a freak windstorm had swept up Puget Sound and knocked out the electricity, so tonight their only light was lanterns and candles. If Darryl had had his way, the storm would have knocked down the sycamore in the backyard with the tree hut in it—but no such luck.

“Can’t you kids keep it down to a dull roar?” Uncle Frank said. “Granny and Gramps are sleeping.”

“Sorry, Pop,” said Barry.

The screen door squeaked again, and Darryl’s parents entered the circle of flickering light. They weren’t a bit plump. There wasn’t an ounce of body fat on either one of them.

“What’s the problem?” Mr. Kirby asked.

“Dare doesn’t want to sleep in the tree hut, Dad,” Jason said.

“Why not?”

“It’s all your doing, Martin,” Aunt Ellie said to Darryl’s father. “Your ghost story’s got them scared to sleep outdoors.”

“How could I resist, with the candles throwing all those shadows on the walls?”

“I’m not scared of Old Man Truman’s ghost,” Jason said.

At dinner Mr. Kirby had described a ghost that supposedly haunted parties of hikers on Mount St. Helens. An old man named Truman had refused to evacuate his cabin on the side of the mountain when it blew its stack back in 1980, so he’d ended up buried in ash and lava.

“I just feel like being comfortable tonight,” Jason said. “Is that a crime?”

“Well, I guess it’s your turn,” Mrs. Kirby said. “What’s the problem, Dare?”

“He said he
liked
the tree hut, Mom,” Darryl said.

“So? Now it’s your turn to like it.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“Oh, for cripe’s sake,” Mr. Kirby said.

Darryl felt a hand on his shoulder: Aunt Ellie’s. “Don’t be hard on him, Martin. His only problem’s his brains. Super-smart people worry about things like ghosts.”

“I’m not scared of ghosts,” Darryl protested.

“Then what are you worried about, hon?” Mrs. Kirby said. “You’re not going to get hypothermia in July.”

“The boy genius is scared of heights,” Jason said. “Simple as that.”

“Good grief, it’s not even twenty feet up,” Mrs. Kirby said. “And the tree hut’s got a door—you can’t fall out.”

“If you don’t want to go up in that tree, Dare,” Aunt Ellie said, “we can put the two armchairs together and make you a bed.”

“Good lord,” Mr. Kirby said. “Most kids’d kill for a chance to sleep in a tree hut.”

At this Darryl marched indignantly into the kitchen and banged out the back door. But one look at the backyard sycamore turned his indignation to foreboding. The windstorm had scoured the sky clean, and
the tree was silhouetted against a field of stars thicker than the one on the opening screen of StarMaster 2. As his mother had said, the tree hut, which looked like a big wooden crate wedged where three limbs came together, couldn’t have been more than twenty feet off the ground. But as his brother had said, Darryl was scared of heights. Had been since the Space Needle incident. It just wasn’t something you advertised when your parents were rock climbers.

A ladder of crooked slats was nailed to the trunk. Darryl climbed it with gritted teeth and threw himself into the tree hut. He shut the door behind him and huddled in a corner, shaking like a leaf. Shaking far more violently, in fact, than the leaves out the window, for in the wake of the storm there wasn’t a breath of wind. He pulled off his sweatshirt and pants and stuffed them in the window so he wouldn’t have to look out; then he curled up in the sleeping bag his brother had left there.

“I wish you were all dead,” Darryl muttered, hugging himself. “I wish you were all dead. …”

He woke to a strange crackling sound, like someone grinding ice. It didn’t smell like ice though. He sat up and, steeling himself for the dizzying view, pulled his wadded clothes out of the window.

A few yards away, a red light was swirling on the cab of a fire engine.

W
hen Darryl got to this point in his story, it felt as if somebody was tightening a noose around his throat. He lost his voice entirely. And that wasn’t the worst. A tear slipped out of his left eye.

He turned and faked a cough, trying to wipe his face without Nina noticing. Then a tear squirted out of his right eye. Followed quickly by another. Then his left eye starting leaking again.

He jerked to his feet. He had to get out of there. But now the tears were pouring out so furiously that all he could see was a fiery blur.

As he groped toward the door, he heard the swoosh of the wall panel. Before he could escape, Nina took his arm and guided him back to the chair and pushed him down and set a box of tissues in his lap.

“Go on, Darryl, cry. It’s good for you.”

He covered his face, humiliated.

“You lost your whole family.’’ From her voice it sounded as if she was kneeling at his feet again. “I only lost my mom, and I cried for weeks.”

A sob broke out of him—and, just like that, his
resistance melted. He simply started sobbing. He sobbed for his mother, and his father, and his aunt Ellie. He sobbed for his grandparents and his uncle and cousin and even his brother. He sobbed for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing till his gut ached so much, he had to curl up in the chair like a baby.

He’d gone through the whole box of tissues—and lost enough saline solution to dilute a full beaker of G-17—before his tear ducts finally dried up. Uncoiling himself, he blinked down at Nina, a human island surrounded by a flotilla of wadded-up tissues. She got up and went into the bathroom and returned with another glass of water.

Drinking it loosened the noose a little.

“Sorry I’m such a wuss,” he said in a croaky voice.

“You’re not a wuss.”

Over the next couple of hours she gently prodded him for the rest of the story, and he told her bits and pieces about the ashy skeleton of his grandparents’ house and his numb night in the police station on Bainbridge Island and his numb ferry ride back to Seattle and his numb visit to a hospital near his house and his numb first week at the Masterly Children’s Shelter. It was close to dawn when exhaustion finally overcame them.

“Rise and shine …”

Blinking groggily in the brightening light, Darryl saw that he was still in one of the red velvet chairs in Nina’s room, while Nina was curled up on the floor amid the crumpled tissues. Her glasses had fallen off, but she found them and blinked at him as the pep talk petered out.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m really tired.”

“Me, too. Maybe we can say we’re sick and sleep in.”

“Yeah … no!”

He jumped up.

“What is it?”

“What if BJ gets through again?”

W
hen BJ slipped in through the shelter’s front door, he was surprised to spot Boris among the kids eating lunch in the dining room. He’d last seen him the day before, being led into the office by Ms. Grimsley, and he’d figured that if the prospective foster parents hadn’t taken him, Boris would have skedaddled. Ms. Grimsley was eating lunch, too, her back to BJ, so he tiptoed across the Oriental rug and scooted up the front stairs unseen. Or so he thought. He’d just walked into the third-floor room when Boris popped in after him.

“Thought that was you. You’d make a sad-ass burglar.”

“We can’t all be born sneaks,” BJ said, noting that the old leather suitcase and Boris’s backpack and the toolbox were all under one of the beds. “How’d it go with the foster parents?”

Boris reached under the bed and pulled a cigarette out of a pouch in his pack, then moved to the open window for his after-lunch smoke. “Grimface says I scared them off,” he said, exhaling into the madrona tree.

“How’d you do that?”

He sniggered. “It was you, bud. They had some file
on me and saw my birthday’s next month and asked what I wanted. I said how somebody kiped my switchblade and I wanted a new one.”

BJ cracked a smile.

“I spent all morning trying to get through that stupid maze,” Boris said, narrowing his eyes at the laptop.

It was on. BJ sat at the desk and hit the Enter key. “Don’t start blowing smoke in my face,” he warned when the maze appeared.

As BJ studied it, Boris, minus his cigarette, came and stood behind him.