The Hole in the Wall (20 page)

Read The Hole in the Wall Online

Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
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And now Ma asked the questions we all wanted to know. “So, Jed, do tell us—where have you been all this time? Why wouldn’t you talk to us when you called? Why did you even leave us?”
“I was at . . .” Jed hesitated.
Now that my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight, I realized just how different he looked now, not just his body but his face. He looked a lot older than eighteen. His eyes were sunken and sad. He had a new scar on his right cheek, all the way from his eye back to his ear and down to the chin. He had a scraggly beard with thin spots that I thought might be covering scars, too.
“I was at ORC.”
And of course we were all bursting with questions about that until Jed gave us a warning look and gestured toward our driver.
“Folks, I really can’t tell you a lot of it. Well, I could tell you—” He grinned his old grin and he didn’t look so aged and beaten down. “—but I’d have to kill you.”
That was one of Jed’s favorite jokes, but at the moment it seemed more scary than funny. He cleared his throat and said, “Sorry. But honestly, a lot of it is top secret. Classified stuff. I wasn’t even supposed to be calling you at all, and I didn’t want my calls traced. I had to sneak around.”
Ma had me cradled in her lap, and the pickup bounced along on the rib road like a baby buggy. Man, I hadn’t felt this spoiled since I carried a blankie. She reached over to stroke Jed’s arm sympathetically. “How much can you tell us, honey? What happened?” She ran her finger gently down the scar on his face. He turned his head away and stared off toward the mudslide.
“I was snooping around in places I didn’t belong. Like some other people I know—” He paused to squint at me and Barbie. “And one day I had an accident. A terrible accident. A long fall. Broke my head open. Broke both legs while I was snowballing down. Landed in a crater of nasty water. Somehow dragged myself halfway onto land, even though I don’t remember doing it. I was almost dead when one of the ORC guards found me. I didn’t wake up for a week.”
“You didn’t run away on purpose?” Barbie whispered.
He drew a deep breath and pressed his lips together tightly, shaking his head. “And I’m sorry you had to think that, believe me, but it was better than the alternative.” Then he continued his story. “At first I thought I was in a hospital. My legs were all bandaged in casts held up in the air with pulleys. Traction, it’s called. My legs had been broken and twisted and—it’s hard to explain. They looked like pretzels before the surgery. Stan showed me the pictures.”
I knew what he’d left out. My back had been there. “Your legs were petrified,” I said.
He licked his lips nervously, craned his head to look through the cab window at Boots Odum, then shrugged and nodded. “Sort of. Petrification is the replacement of organic material with minerals, through capillary action, and it takes hundreds or thousands of years or even longer. What happened to me is called adrification. I was the first human it happened to . . . well, at least to this extent. They didn’t know what to do. They performed surgery to straighten my legs out, but I’m still not normal. The adrium is still in my tissues.”
“So that’s what it’s called,” said Barbie. “Adrium.”
We all knew he was talking about the substance that ORC was mining from the rocks.
Jed nodded. “Based on the Hindi word for rock. A new element that Stan discovered. So far, it hasn’t been located anywhere else on earth. It has unusual properties of attraction, but it’s, well, I can’t go into it very far. Besides having to kill you if I tell you, it involves a lot of science that I don’t completely understand yet myself. But suffice it to say, from what we know so far, some isotopes are stable, some are unstable, some are right-handed and behave one way, some are left-handed and behave another way, and the more we experiment—”
“Wait!” I blurted. “Adrium has hands?”
Jed smiled crookedly in the moonlight. “Handedness isn’t just about hands—it’s about which side is dominant. And the harder we try to figure it out, the more trouble we get into.”
“You say
we
a lot,” Ma said. “Are you working for ORC now?”
“Not yet, but someday maybe. Obviously I’ve had a lot of free time, and Stan’s been teaching me some things. You’ll be happy to know I’ve finished my high school diploma already. As soon as we find a cure, I’m going to start working on degrees in biochemical engineering and physics. But I can’t go to college with these legs.” He gave his left brace a slap.
“You seem to get around all right,” Ma said.
“True. The problem is we don’t know yet exactly how the adrium poison spreads, and we don’t have an antidote yet. Until we know it’s contained, Stan says we can’t risk exposing the public.”
Did he say
poison
? “Thanks a lot for nothing!” I said, punching his arm. “Are we going to be prisoners at ORC now like you?”
“Seb, I’m not a prisoner. I’m in secret quarantine. And you, dough boy, have already been exposed. Everyone at home may have been. Our property has the most intense concentration of unstable adrium I’ve—whoops.” He looked over his shoulder again. “Forget I said that.”
The pickup had bumped to a sudden stop. Stan Odum was showing his hairy hand to the electric eye that opened the security gate. After all those spying missions, I was finally entering the Onion.
18
Now that the truck had stopped, I heard Barbie’s teeth chattering. Mine decided to join hers. We’d gotten chilled in the cave, and riding in the open air had sucked any remaining warmth out. On the bright side, I noticed that my teeth didn’t ache anymore, even when they clanked together like ice.
Jed put an arm around each of us and rubbed our shoulders briskly as he said, “Don’t worry, guys. Stan will take good care of you. He’s really a good fella underneath all the bulldozers. The Gash to the Onion was graveled with good intentions.”
Boots Odum a good fella? This was not the same Jed who used to picket outside the entrance to ORC, protesting the ruin of the land in the gore.
The truck spiraled downward through a parking garage with several floors. The top floor held all the huge equipment under the height of the dome—bulldozers, dump trucks, backhoes. The middle floors held more cars than I’d expect during the wee hours of Sunday night. There must be more people working here than I ever realized.
On the bottom floor, we passed a bunch more vehicles—one, a very familiar rusty red pickup. Me and Barbie gaped at each other.
Ma seemed stunned. “What’s your father’s truck doing here?”
We all looked at Jed.
“I’ll explain later,” he whispered. “The walls in this place have ears. And eyes. Beware.”
We went all the way to the end of the spiral and stopped right next to the entrance on the bottom floor. We must have been pretty deep underground. The parking spot had the number one painted on the concrete and a RESERVED CEO sign posted on the wall.
“We’re here.” Jed scooched himself to the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate, then dropped to the floor, moving better than I expected him to in his leg braces. “Come on.” He held out his hand to help Ma down.
“Alrighty, then,” said Boots Odum, joining us. He hoisted up his jeans by the belt loops, reminding me so much of Pa that I stepped behind Ma. “I realize you folks will want to know why I brought you here instead of taking you home. Unfortunately, there’s a lot I can’t say. Some questions simply don’t have answers. Some things, I can’t say because of classified information. So please bear with me.”
“Classified by whom?” said Ma in a tight voice, her arms crossed over her chest. “Are you working for the government, Stan?”
Boots Odum ignored that and continued with his welcome speech. “One thing I do know is that we have to scan you all immediately, just to make sure you’re all right.”
“All right,” said Ma, her arms still crossed. “Why wouldn’t we be all right?”
He winced at her apologetically, then looked at his watch. “We’d better hurry.”
I wanted to ask why the rush, but I figured that was classified too.
Our host stepped to the entrance, showed his hand to another electric eye, and led the way past a series of wide elevators down a long hallway with white concrete block walls, like at school. I followed at his heels, taking it all in.
The legendary boots clickety-clacked on the hard tile floor and left a faint trail of leathery aroma along with clods of mud they were tracking in. Jed’s steps went THUMP unevenly behind us, like one leg took longer than the other, but he kept up.
The walls had lots of doors. Some had normal department names like Human Resources or Payroll, and some had mysterious names like Project Foobar or Little Genius Lab. Every door had a security scanner. You probably had to let an electric eye scan your hand to use the bathroom if you worked at ORC.
Occasionally an archway would curve off into another hallway, reminding me of the passages in the tunnel where we’d found the cavern. A strange sweet scent that I recognized right away drifted from one hallway.
“I know that smell from somewhere,” said Ma.
“What is that smell, Mr. Odum?” I had a pretty good idea it was adrium, but I wanted to hear what Boots would say. He didn’t answer, so I stopped and turned on my heels at the arch with the sweet smell. “Where does this hallway go?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to go there, brother,” said Jed, grabbing me by the shirt neck and hauling me back in line without missing a step.
Finally the boots stopped at a double-wide door. With another hand scan, it slid open, and our host bowed with his right arm gesturing grandly, “After you, ladies and germs.”
Jed took my hand firmly as we entered. The lights weren’t as bright and harsh here, and blue carpet softened the floor. The first thing I noticed was a pot of daffodils in the center of a large wooden table with fancy upholstered chairs around it like somebody’s dining room. To our right was a nurses’ station with nobody behind it. On the far side of the daffodil table, pastel striped curtains dangled from steel runners in the ceiling. Some curtains were pulled across to make rooms like in the hospital where we had visited Grum when she broke her wrists. Other curtains were tied back, showing empty beds.
“My old room,” Jed said, pointing to a bed with steel posts that rose up at the four corners supporting a box-shaped frame overhead. From the steel frame dangled all sorts of pulleys and ropes and a metal triangle like a super-sized coat hanger.
A woman pulling a white medical jacket on over green hospital clothes came yawning out of a doorway behind the nurses’ station. Her light brown hair was bedraggled, and her cheek had a deep sleep crease. As the door slowly closed behind her, I noticed a tousled bed. Maybe she lived here all the time, like Jed. How many other people did ORC have tucked away living secret lives?
“Good evening, Dr. Mills. Sorry for the short notice,” said Boots Odum. The woman wiped her eyes and yawned, “S’all right.” After the yawn finished, she said, carefully pronouncing every sound, “I am here to serve, Mr. Odum.”
“Thank you nevertheless, doctor,” he said. “How is our newest patient?”
Dr. Mills frowned and glanced toward the closed curtains. “Life signs are stable for now.”
Boots Odum nodded. I felt Jed’s hand fall lower. His shoulders had slumped. What had deflated him?
“Hello, Jed,” said the doctor with a big smile in her voice. Water sounds splashed behind the tall counter as she washed her hands. “Good to see you looking spry.”
“Thanks, doc.” Jed tipped his head to her. “Wouldn’t be here without you.” He turned to Ma. “Dr. Mills is the one who saved my life and fixed my pretzels so I could walk on them.”
The doctor and Boots Odum exchanged worried glances. “Pretzels!” He chuckled, giving Jed a fond pat on the shoulder. “Your colorful expressions always entertain me, son, but you don’t want to give your family the wrong idea, do you? Pretzels.” He chuckled some more.
“He doesn’t want Jed to give us the
right
idea,” Barbie whispered in my ear.
The doctor looked me up and down as she came around the counter, snapping purple gloves onto her hands. “You say the boy is already infected?”
Boots Odum quit chuckling and nodded. “Ingested. And I want the girl scanned, too. Then Mrs. Daniels.”
The boy. The girl. You’d think he’d figure out our names if he was going to kidnap and scan us and maybe make us disappear from the face of the earth like Jed did for all those months he was being held in
secret quarantine.
“My name is Barbara,” the Shish said. “You can call me Barb. Only my family is allowed to call me Barbie. And this is Sebastian. Everyone calls him Sebby.”
“Say cheese,” I said, waving toward the ceiling where a video camera pointed straight at us. Then it moved on in a slow circle, capturing the whole room.
“Pleased to meet you both,” said the doctor, seeming to mean it. She looked really nice when she smiled even though she’d looked like a plain grumpy person when she’d walked out of her sleeping room. “And Mrs. Daniels.” She reached out to shake Ma’s hand. Ma reluctantly brushed fingers with her.

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