The Nerdy Dozen (15 page)

“What? No way. Let's just get to the aircraft carrier,” Trevor argued.

“Something's wrong with the plane. I can feel it!” Neil insisted.

“Neil, let's just get out of here. What would stopping do?” Jason 1 argued. “If something's wrong, the guys on the
Martin Van Buren
can fix it.”

“Sorry, guys,” whispered Neil, rearing back in a giant, lightning-fast split S. Trevor tried reaching for the controls, but everyone's weight was magnified by four times that of regular gravity, and Trevor's hand flopped back, useless.

“Come on, come on,” Neil muttered. The islands were right below him. Like a futuristic pilot coming out of a light-speed warp drive, Neil pulled back on the jet's thrust. But his timing was off, and he slowed the Chameleon just in time to clip the tops of the tallest palm trees on the island. The nose of the fighter careened down abruptly, burying them once again in the sand.

For the second time this Memorial Day weekend, Neil was at the beach. In the worst possible way.

“IS EVERYBODY OKAY?” NEIL ASKED HIS FLIGHT CREW, RUBBING the back of his stinging neck.

A muffled “yeah” came from those around him, and Neil breathed a sigh of relief. He looked out the cockpit windows to see ostriches sprinting in every direction. Two strutted up next to the plane and began to peck curiously at the edge of the wing.

“Well, we're back where we started, Ashley. Couldn't get enough of this place, huh?” Trevor groaned. “I can't believe you! We should be halfway to the aircraft carrier!”

Neil tried hovering up and out but only succeeded in creating a clamoring whir of the engines.

“What were you thinking, Neil?” Jason 1 said, sighing.

“And now Harris probably has his communication grid or whatever back up and running,” Sam said, defeated. Even she seemed frustrated with him. She flicked the transmission switch for the plane's radio communications, but only static filtered out.

Trevor's barbs were fairly commonplace at this point, but disappointing Sam made Neil feel awful. He'd been so sure something was wrong with the plane, yet maybe he'd acted too soon.

Silently, everyone hopped out of the cockpit to slide down the exterior of the Chameleon and land on the beach. As the others began digging the Chameleon from the sand, Neil turned and faced the water. He needed a minute to think things through and started to skip rocks into the ocean. With every plunk of a rock into the clear-blue water, Neil's thoughts drifted to home and how much he wanted to be there right now, even if Janey had mastered the art of breaking a new type of wood, or whatever roughly femur-sized object she learned to splinter during her weekend tournament.

Hmm, Janey.

When they were little, Janey had once borrowed a working, functioning submarine toy from Neil. It was yellow and remote-controlled, and it was capable of plunging ten feet into the water with ease. Back when he trusted Janey, before she became the terrifying karate enforcer she was today, Neil let her take it to a pool party at a friend's house. It had been one of Neil's favorite toys, but when she returned it, it no longer did anything that made it cool. It didn't dive; it didn't stay upright. He couldn't get it to make even one lousy bubble. Neil was the proud owner of a floating yellow log.

Wait. . . .
Neil thought of the dogfight he'd just escaped and how the other planes had always known where they were even though they were invisible.
Could Harris have left the plane for us to take but removed the best part?

Neil ran back to the Chameleon and crawled into the auxiliary seat. Trevor and Sam were angrily scooping sand from the nose of the fighter, slowly unearthing the craft, while Riley and Jason 1 helped keep away the curious ostriches.

“You feel like helping us, Neil?” Trevor scoffed.

But Neil ignored Trevor, searching instead for the plane's invisibility switch. He turned it on and watched as the plane blinked erratically, trying to turn on the scales. Neil ran back outside, and he could see the exterior as plain as day.

“Guys! Guys! It's the invisibility!” Neil screamed. “That's what Harris wanted! Not the plane. Not us. He took the scales!”

“What are you talking about?” Trevor snapped, but Sam's voice interrupted him.

“Cut it out,” she said to Trevor with a glare. “Neil, I'm sorry. What were you saying?”

“The invisibility,” Neil explained. “That's why he stole the first plane; that's why he wanted those other fighters. He doesn't care about flying, or the plane. He just wants the invisibility technology.”

“Just because you broke our plane's invisibility doesn't mean Harris—” Trevor started to say, but Sam cut him off again.

“Hey, guys,” she said, her voice shaking. “I think you'll want to see this.”

They turned around and followed her gaze. She stood transfixed, looking out at Harris's island and the warehouse. They watched as what appeared to be a translucent bubble formed over Harris's island and began shimmering. Slowly, the entire island vanished, fading from the horizon and looking just like another section of roiling seawater against a pastel sky. The suspension bridge from the main island vanished, too.

“He . . . he made the entire
island
invisible,” Neil stammered. He looked at his watch, which read
1530H
. “We've got thirty minutes till that transfer!”

“We've got to go stop him,” Sam said. “The question is, how
?
”

 

The five kids opened the storage cache for their Chameleon and peered inside, hoping to find something, anything, they could use. In the back corner, Neil spotted a bundle of thick yellow material, which he grabbed and dragged onto the beach.

“Maybe this'll work,” Neil said.

Sam hurriedly pulled the inflation valve, and seconds later, a yellow life raft sprang out like a blossoming, waterproof flower. A floating hexagon that could hold them all.

“Okay. Now, let's get in. We've got to get moving,” Trevor ordered. He edged the raft toward the water.

“That's the wrong way,” Neil and Sam started to say both at once. “The island is that way.”

Neil looked up to realize that he and Sam were pointing in completely opposite directions.

“Wait,” Sam said, trying to understand what had just happened. “Where is it?”

But no one could agree. Riley and Jason 1 each pointed to different places, too. Somehow, in their haste to come up with a plan, they'd completely lost their sense of direction. It didn't help that everything on the island looked the same, just ostriches and beach and, in the distance, foam-capped waves. Neil tried to search the shoreline for a landmark of some kind, but he saw nothing but more waves and the occasional sandbar.

Wait, that sandbar looks familiar
, Neil thought. He examined it more closely, wondering if it was just some memory from being stuck on the island earlier. Then it struck him. Feather Duster! This was the starting line for the final level, the race against Ozzie Tritch. The path that he had followed between sandbars through shallow water and that led all the way to the warehouse.
Harris must have really based the game on this island!

“Guys, I know this might sound crazy, but I think . . .” Neil hesitated. “I think we need to ride those ostriches.” The five of them looked out at the countless birds running across the beach, pecking at whatever bits of food they found on the ground.

“Are you serious?” Sam asked.

“Actually, I am,” Neil said, and explained about the game, and how this was the landscape of the final race. “If we can saddle up these bad boys, I'm pretty sure we can ride them to the warehouse.”

“I can catch one,” Jason 1 said, immediately sprinting after a bird. Neil watched as it sped away from him, irritably flapping its small wings. Neil started to approach one of the ostriches and then remembered Weo's words about the peanut butter sound. He cleared his throat to produce a thick, guttural noise.

“Are you choking?” Sam exclaimed, hurrying forward, ready to administer the Heimlich maneuver.

“No! Weo told me this is how to calm them down. Ostriches, they like the sound of you trying to eat a sandwich with too much peanut butter,” Neil explained. He continued, cupping his hands around his mouth while his tongue made a slick, noisy
thwack
.

Trevor started laughing at Neil, but the sound worked—seconds later, a large ostrich was making its way toward Neil, sporadically tilting its head as it moved forward. Neil held his hand out, and the ostrich softly pecked at it, scouring every knuckle for the potential of food.

Riley, who was known in certain regional faire circuits as Ye Olde Swine Whisperer, worked his magic with four other ostriches roaming the beach, gathering them all together into a gray-and-black-feathered ostrich flock.

“Hey there, buddy,” Neil murmured, walking up to his ostrich hesitantly. “Wait, sorry. Buddy's a dumb name. I'm going to call you Reggie. Reggie the Ostrich.”

The bird squawked in approval.

“Nice. I wish Biggs were here to see this. Something tells me he'd be right at home with this type of thing.” Neil placed his left hand on the ostrich's wing and took a huge, bracing hop, swinging his body up onto the flightless bird.

“You guys can do it!” he encouraged the others once he was safely seated on Reggie.

As the others started to jump onto their respective ostriches, Neil experimented with how to control Reggie. When he pulled gently on Reggie's wings where they connected to his body, the bird pranced in a high-stepping circle. Neil had to focus on balancing or else he would slip right off. As he held on tight using leg muscles that were previously unknown to him, Neil wondered if this was what riding a unicycle was like.

“Okay, guys, let's move,” Neil said once everyone was settled. The birds bounced and chortled and flitted around, clearly excited to be moving in a group. “We have to get there by four,” he added.

“What happens then?” Sam was leaning completely forward, her arms wrapped tightly around the bony neck of her ostrich.

“To be honest, I'm not sure,” Neil admitted. “But we've got to find out.”

With a squeeze of his legs, Neil guided Reggie toward the sandbars dotting the horizon. Seeing this, the other ostriches followed, their claws flicking wet sand behind them up in the air. Reggie moved in jagged, huge strides, covering great swaths of ground with ease. The flock headed in the direction of the afternoon sun and slowly curved right, following the thin strips of sand emerging from the water. Neil could feel hot and humid ocean breezes on his face.

“This is nuts!” Sam laughed as she drew even with Neil, their ostriches sprinting ahead. “I'm gonna beat you!”

Jason 1, however, passed both of them, and as the flock sprinted together, they saw a flash of light ahead. It was the edge of the bubble Harris had somehow created. They had unknowingly broken through, and they looked up to see a shimmering bubble encompassing the island.

“Whoa,” Neil said as he guided Reggie to step in, then out, then back into the silvery bubble broadcast. It was flawless, almost like being inside a Chameleon. Neil couldn't believe it. Harris had somehow taken the scales and used them to project invisibility so that no one outside the dome could see what was happening within. It was genius.

Trevor's and Riley's ostriches soon caught up, bleating under their weight. They stepped into the bubble and peered back in the direction they'd come from.

“How is he doing it?” Trevor wondered aloud.

Neil swallowed unsteadily. The question wasn't so much
how
as it was
why
. He had to figure out what Harris was plotting.

STILL SITTING ATOP THEIR OSTRICHES, NEIL AND THE OTHERS paused on the wet sand to look at Harris's compound from a new angle. They could see how it was carved into the rock of the island with a tumbling waterfall rushing down its side.

“That's how we get in,” Neil said, nodding at the waterfall.

“Wait, you're not serious,” Trevor argued.

“Yup. Just trust me. You'll need some speed, and get ready to jump once you break through the water,” Neil explained. He felt calm. For the first time in his life, he actually knew what was coming in real life—because he had already played it in a video game.

“I cannot do this,” Riley said. “The fall of the waters, I like it not.”

“Come on,” Trevor snapped, even though just seconds ago he had seemed afraid too.

But Neil was thinking. They didn't
all
need to go inside. And there was something else Riley could do that would help them.

“Riley,” Neil said, “do you think you could ride back the way we came?”

“Of course. I can ride for you, my liege,” Riley said, bowing his round head in Neil's direction.

“Okay, basically you just need to follow the path we just took and head into the middle of the jungle. Once you pass a rock shaped like an old man's face and see something that looks like it could be called snake mountain, start making noise—a lot of noise. My friend will find you,” Neil instructed. “His name is Weo. Tell him Neil needs his help. And keep an eye out for trip wires—he makes one heck of a net.”

“I will not let you down, sire!” Riley gushed.

“Fare thee well, Lord Riley,” Neil said. Riley smiled and turned to start heading back toward Ostrich Island.

“I'll go with him,” said Jason 1. “No way is anybody back home gonna believe this.”

“You're sending them to Weo? The kid who held us hostage?” Trevor asked, disbelieving.

“We need backup,” Neil said. But that wasn't the whole reason he'd thought of Weo. He remembered the car ride with Harris, how he'd recoiled at the mention of Weo's name. Neil knew that some extra help might be their best chance at stopping him, and Weo and Harris had a history. “Trevor, if you don't want to face the waterfall, you can go back to the other island, too,” he offered.

Trevor paused, looking back at the sandy path they'd just traversed, then up at the waterfall. “I'll stay,” he said, glaring. “You two wouldn't last long without me. And hey, this is a team, right?”

“You know it. And I'm glad you're on it,” Neil responded.

“Whatever.”

“All right, let's save the lovey-dovey stuff for the postgame interviews, boys,” Sam interrupted, her ostrich restlessly flapping its wings.

Neil turned to face the waterfall again. He took a deep breath, then urged Reggie forward, gathering speed until he was running at the waterfall headfirst. With two more steps, he jerked back on Reggie's bony wings, urging him to leap. With water beading on his feathers, Reggie leaped from one foot over the wide abyss, just like in the video game. Neil peered down and saw magma swirling under thin cracks in the volcanic ground below.
It really is just like the game.

Neil turned back to make sure the others were okay. He watched as Sam, then Trevor, successfully splashed through the sheet of fast-moving water and over the abyss. Once they had safely joined him, he pivoted to peer down the rocky tunnel, its damp walls echoing the soft, persistent sound of rushing water.

With a nod to the others, Neil dismounted from Reggie and darted off, running down the long, dim tunnel. It wasn't long before he noticed the temperature cooling off, the air growing less damp. And then the tunnel emerged directly into the main room of Harris's warehouse.

Neil stood in a corner of the vast room, blinking in shock at the scene before him.

The warehouse was now barely lit, and dramatic shadows from boxes and equipment were cast down on the floor. Only one of the giant ceiling lights was on, spilling out a single beam. Harris stood on a temporary platform in the center of the room, wearing a skintight silver bodysuit. It literally sparkled, its exterior reflective and metallic. He even wore glasses made of the same material. Around him, his guards stood in a huge pack, all wearing identical costumes. But Neil's eyes were drawn to the object next to Harris, some kind of glowing spire. It looked almost like it could be powering something—
like an island-sized bubble of invisibility, for instance
, he thought. Neil wondered if it could be drawing on the electromagnetic power from the lava below.

“But why sell it now? We could do so many more things!” Neil heard one of Harris's cohorts ask. Neil held out an arm to keep the others back. They still hadn't been seen. “We could rob banks! Take on whole armies!”

“We don't need to rob banks!” Harris exclaimed. “This is just the first two billion dollars. Now that we have the technology, we can clone more of it later. With this money, we'll be one step closer to the grand relaunch. Actually, two billion steps closer.”

“But your game got canceled! How are you relaunching?”

Trevor and Sam tiptoed forward, and Neil followed, still utterly silent.

“It'll be easy to relaunch when there are no other games to compete with!” Harris snapped. “As soon as this wire transfer is complete, I will be able to purchase every video-game manufacturer on the planet and destroy them all. I want to eliminate all the competition, and to do that, I'm going to have to go to the source.”

“But what will we do when there's no more video games?” a slow-sounding, thick-fingered goon asked.

“You won't need any other games! No one will! Feather Duster and Feather Duster 2: Eclectic Bugaboo are the only games anyone needs! The only games anyone will be able to get!”

“Did . . . are the controls more lifelike?” asked a curious guard.

“The controls are perfect!” Harris yelled shrilly. “You're fired for asking that!”

The giant screen looming behind him, previously blank, lit up with some kind of video chat. Except instead of a face, the square for the other person displayed a red
UNAVAILABLE
sign. In the bottom corner of the feed was Harris's face, projecting from where he stood in front of a sleek computer perched atop the control console.

“As promised, before the transfer is complete,” Harris said to whoever was on the other end of the video chat, “a look at the technology you're paying for.”

“Good,” said the gravelly mysterious voice.

Neil noticed that underneath the video chat was a bright-blue progress bar showing the status of a transfer of just over two billion dollars. The progress read
81%
and was slowly crawling toward completion. At this rate, it would take only a few minutes to finish.

Harris signaled to a nearby crony, who flipped a switch near the radiant tower in the center of the room. And slowly, just like the Chameleon did and just like the island had, Harris drifted out of sight. Whoever was watching the video feed would be able to see that he was still there as he plopped his white captain's hat onto his invisible head.

“I trust you will find ways of making this useful,” Harris said to the person on the other end.

“Oh yes, indeed,” said the voice. “And the technology will transfer to me immediately when this monetary transaction is complete? Of course, I wouldn't dream of taking it until the transaction has gone through and you are satisfied.”

“Of course,” Harris said. “It is programmed to send immediately upon confirmation from my offshore bank.”

“Very well,” the voice said, and then the transmission ended.

“Guards!” Harris called out, and the same mouth-breathing crony flipped the switch again and returned Harris to a visible state.

“Okay,” Neil said, turning back to Sam and Trevor. Both looked as terrified as he did, their faces pale. “You guys heard that, right? What do you think we should do?”

In the corner, Neil could see the now-empty office that they had been held captive in earlier, and his eyes scanned the broken glass as he tried to think of a plan. But then footsteps sounded behind him. Reggie had followed them from the tunnel—and had apparently decided it was time to speak up. He honked loudly, the noise echoing through the warehouse like a fire horn.

At the sound, Harris and his cronies looked up sharply. “Well, well, well,” Harris said. “Look who decided to come back.”

With a smirk, Harris reached for the hefty lever on the device next to him. And he and his henchmen all turned invisible.