The Adventures of Kid Combat Volume Two: The Heist of Spring Road Toys (2 page)

Preventing a person from falling off each
level were thick marble railings. Samantha made her way to the
railing and bent down. From here, she could start her mission.

Below Samantha, a man stood in the middle of
the museum’s first floor foyer, speaking harshly to two boys. A
fourth figure, a boy dressed in all blue, exited the room before
Samantha could get a good look at him.

From the intelligence that Gears had given
her, Samantha knew the man to be Alfred E. Scott, the curator of
the museum. He was a mysterious personage, in that none of the
town’s people really knew much information about him. From the bio
created about him by the members of SOCKs, Samantha knew the
following information:

Alfred Scott was in his late forties.
Divorced for many years, he lived alone in the fourth-floor loft of
the museum. A well-kept man always wearing a black suit, white
shirt, and black bow tie, he had overseen every function of the
museum for the better part of a decade. He had no visible scars or
tattoos, but he had a thick black mustache and beard. For some
unknown reason he always carried a walking cane with him. No
apparent physical limitations made a cane necessary. Its presence
seemed only to heighten the importance of his appearance.

As Samantha sat behind the marble railing,
she waited patiently for the curator to divulge something that
would help SOCKs decipher what possible danger this museum posed to
the neighboring toy store, Spring Road Toys.

Over the past few weeks, many of the property
owners adjacent to the museum had started selling their property.
One by one, the businesses closed their doors and sold their land
to the curator. The reasons why were never too clear, and Samantha
was sent in to find out clues to those details.

Samantha sat idle in her spot and listened to
the group below chat for a few minutes. The story on why the owners
sold their land became a bit clearer when one of the boys asked
what exactly was required of them.

“I’ve been waiting far too long for that old
couple to sell their lot to me,” the curator began. He circled
around the two boys, trying to intimidate them. “For months I have
made them offers to relinquish their land to me, all very fair
prices. Yet, nothing. Well, it’s time to show them who they are
dealing with.”

The curator made his final circle around the
two boys. From Samantha’s angle, she couldn’t make out their faces,
but she could tell they were both older, probably sixth- or
seventh-graders. Their importance to this assignment was growing.
To help identify them later, Samantha needed to get a look at their
faces.

As the curator continued to talk, Samantha
stood up and slowly slinked her way around the banister to the
other side of the square. Keeping her eyes focused on two things at
once, Samantha made her way around the first corner, all the while
keeping an eye on the three below. The sides of the boys’ faces
came into sight, but Samantha wanted the full view.

She made her way around the artifacts and
displays and came across to the opposite side of the open area.
Hiding behind a scale model of the solar system, Samantha took off
her backpack and unzipped a small pocket on the side of it. From
it, she produced her digital camera and started taking pictures of
the three. She zoomed in tightly on the two boys and got several
good shots of their faces. She also got some nice shots of the
curator talking to them.

“
Say ‘cheese,’ boys
,” Samantha
muttered to herself as she prepared to take the last shot. Then,
from behind her, she heard footsteps walking toward her. It was one
of the night guards. Samantha turned her head around to see the
flashlight beam streaming back and forth behind her. The guard was
in plain sight and she could see his face moving back and forth
looking across the museum for any intruders. Little did he know he
was about to find one.

Samantha hastily picked up her backpack and
flung it over one shoulder. Camera in hand, she proceeded to her
left and quickly made her way back to her point of entry. She kept
close tabs on the man behind her, looking directly at him as she
rounded a corner. That’s when Sam was stopped in her tracks as she
came face to face with another night guard. She never saw him until
her head hit him square in the belly. Both parties, startled by the
sight of one another, froze for a second staring at each other.

“Uh-oh,” Samantha exclaimed as she looked
right up at the man’s face through her mask.

“Hey! Who are you?” yelled the man, not
expecting to see a young kid looking back at him.

“Let’s keep that a surprise, shall we?”
Samantha said as she turned and started to run off. The guard’s
hand swiped at Samantha’s arm and caught her briefly. She stumbled,
only for a moment, and quickly regained her balance and took off
down the hall toward the planetary exhibit. The man quickly
followed and unholstered his radio to alert the other guards.

“Security breach! Security breach! Level two.
In pursuit,” the guard said as he huffed and puffed after Samantha.
Below, the curator heard the call over his radio and looked up at
the opening above him. He saw the faint shadow of a small figure
run by, followed closely by the guard. The two boys stood beside
him and looked up and saw the same thing.

“Follow them!” yelled the curator to the two
boys. The boys ran toward the adjacent staircase and ascended to
aid in the chase.

Samantha ran down the hall as the planets in
the solar system flew by. She was only at Jupiter and needed to get
to the far end of the Pluto display. Even though Pluto had been
declassified as a “planet,” the curator of the museum held a
special fondness for the dwarf planet and refused to take the
exhibit down.

Samantha continued down the hallway and
looked behind her. She saw the night guards quickly losing ground.
They were too out of shape to keep up with a ten-year-old girl. She
was, on the other hand, surprised to see the two boys catching up
rapidly.

Saturn flew by, and Samantha let out a small
chuckle as she passed by Uranus. Neptune was nothing more than a
big blue blur as she rounded past the giant planet and made her way
toward her final destination, Pluto.

The small dwarf of ice and rock came into
view as Samantha entered the exhibit. All the lights in the small
room were off, save the one illuminating the small world. The light
reflected off its shiny exterior and made it hard for Samantha to
see much else in the room.

She ran straight for the six-foot-high model.
Behind it, an access door led out to a small landing platform on
the second-floor roof of the museum. From there, Samantha would
make her escape from this place.

Down a short hallway, up a flight of ten
stairs, and then onto the roof—that was the plan. Simple and
efficient, the way most SOCKs plans ran. From there, Samantha was
to shimmy down a drainage pipe and run across the parking lot to
the set of bushes next to the mailbox where the rover was
hidden.

The rover was Gears’s latest project, made
with the help of his new right-hand man, Roller. The rover was
nothing more than a glorified go-cart. The steel frame was square
in shape and big enough to hold one rider. The pieces of steel came
from the old hang glider Kid Combat used to escape out of Jones’s
mansion a few weeks back. Seemed its flight-worthy days had
expired.

The engine had five-horsepower and belonged
to Wedge – one half of the set of twins on Kid Combat’s team. Wedge
had the engine hidden in his parent’s garage. It was from his
“private collection” of “things that could help him go really
fast.”. The steering column, wheels, and other parts had come from
each of the SOCKs members’ garages and were assembled in Maple
Forest in The Playground.

The rover went pretty fast. It would hit
thirty miles per hour without much effort. Wedge held the record
for fastest test lap around The Playground. He also held the record
for most damage done to The Playground on a single lap.

In an effort to save time for Samantha,
Roller came up with the idea of outfitting the rover with a remote
control device that would allow him or Gears to start the rover
remotely from The Playground. This way, if Samantha was in a bind,
as she was tonight, she wouldn’t have to waste time starting the
rover. She could simply jump on and take off. Roller and Gears had
tested that feature several times before tonight’s mission.

Samantha tried to run faster. The boys racing
footsteps sounded behind her. They both gained ground at every step
of the way. One of the boys made a last-ditch effort to stop the
unknown intruder. He dove, head first, and attempted to tackle the
small girl. Samantha countered and jumped up in the air. The boy’s
hand came close, but it wasn’t close enough. He fell to the floor
with a thud and momentarily fell behind in the chase.

His partner tried the same maneuver. He too
dove straight at Samantha’s back leg. He made a grunting noise as
he hurled himself toward her. Samantha tried the same jump she did
with the first boy, but this time she wasn’t as lucky.

Knowing her move, the second boy’s right hand
hooked and snagged on the back of Samantha’s ankle, knocking her
off balance and sending her crashing to the ground. As Samantha hit
the floor in a painful collision, her instincts forced her to
outstretch her arms in an effort to catch herself. This caused her
to slide for a few feet and in the end she lost her handle on the
camera. The small device hit the floor and was sent spiraling
across the marble floor. In its final rotation, the camera smacked
up against the far wall and shattered to pieces.

As Samantha lifted herself up off the floor,
she had no choice. Sam had to leave the camera, its memory card,
and all the pictures behind. Being caught would be a far worse
situation. Samantha regained her composure and her lead and sprung
through the access door behind the small model of Pluto. She raced
down the small hallway and opened the door leading onto the roof of
the museum.

The wind caught her face. For a moment,
Samantha lost her breath and had a hard time talking over her
communicator.

“Gears. Roller,” she puffed, “I’m out and
I’ve got company!”

Back at The Playground, the two boys
feverishly typed away on their keyboards. Two monitors displayed
the results of their labor, showing real-time pictures of the town
and infrared shots of the museum.

Gears and Roller had been busy over the past
few weeks setting up surveillance all around town. When word had
come that Spring Road Toys was in jeopardy, they concentrated all
their efforts on making sure the square block around the toy store
was secure. The two boys continued to type away and bicker back and
forth—as usual.

“Hurry up, Gears,” Roller spouted out as he
slammed away on his keyboard. “She won’t last long out there by
herself!”

“I’m trying!” Gears rang out, not looking up
from his keyboard. Moments went by that, to Gears, seemed like
forever. “It’s … it’s not responding.”

Roller looked over at Gears, and then he
looked at the monitors. “They gotta be right on her tail.
Hurry!”

Samantha ran to the far end of the museum’s
roof and waited. She then realized that this wasn’t where she was
supposed to make her exit. Her heart was pounding, and she began to
sweat—too much for her liking. She took off her mask in a fit of
frustration and waited for an answer from the boys.

“Gears! What’s going on?” she shouted.

“I told you—it’s not responding to any of the
commands!” Gears snapped back.

“You said you checked it?” Kid chimed in.

“I did. We did. Several times,” Gears
defended himself to KC.