The Project (6 page)

“You always have the coolest toys,” Luke said, following Tommy into the room.

It was Tommy’s parents’ private library, stacked floor to ceiling with books, neatly arranged on shelves of varying heights.

“Why would anyone want so many books?” Luke asked, but Tommy ignored him.

“Give me a hand,” he said. Tommy ran his finger along the spines, clearly not quite sure what he was looking for.

Luke sighed and started on the other side of the room.
The section he was looking in had a long row of classics, like Shakespeare and Dickens. He had just found a shelf of poetry, with names such as Longfellow and Wordsworth on the spines, when Tommy said, “Here we go.”

Lightning flashed again, and rain hammered against the window. Luke was glad they’d made it back before the storm had hit.

Tommy was flipping through a large cloth-covered book titled
A Guide to Rare and Lost Books
.

“Did you know that a first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works from 1623 is estimated at six million dollars?” Tommy said.

Luke whistled. Compared to that,
Leonardo’s River
was a bargain.

Tommy continued. “An original copy of the Declaration of Independence is worth eight million, but the rarest book in the world is the Gutenberg Bible. It was published in 1456 and was the first book ever printed. A complete first edition today is worth twenty-five to thirty million dollars!”

“Got a copy of that at home,” Luke said casually.

“Yeah, right.”

“We use it to prop up the coffee table with the wonky leg.”

Tommy laughed.

“What about
Leonardo’s River
?” Luke asked.

“Hang on,” he said, still reading. “Get this. Remember your buddy da Vinci? If you found an original collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts, they could be worth as much as a hundred million dollars!”

Luke thought about that for a moment, wondering what he’d spend that kind of money on.

Tommy skipped to another section in the book and ran a finger down the page. “He was a famous artist and scientist, born in 1452. He painted the
Mona Lisa
—that’s that picture of the lady with the funny smile—”

“I know what the
Mona Lisa
looks like,” Luke said.

“And another famous painting called
The Last Supper
. Plus he invented all kinds of things, years ahead of his time.”

“Like what?” Luke asked.

Tommy turned the book around and showed Luke some pictures. “Submarines, helicopters, tanks, machine guns, solar power, stuff that didn’t exist until hundreds of years later.”

“That’s unreal,” Luke said. “But what about
Leonardo’s River
?”

“Here it is,” Tommy said. “A whole page on it, and there’s a picture of the cover.”

He held up Luke’s drawing, comparing it to the picture in the book.

Luke wrenched the book from him and stared closely at it. “That’s the book I saw in the library,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Tommy asked.

“Does a cow lift its tail to fart?”

Tommy raised an eyebrow. “Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. What are we going to do?” Tommy asked.

“About what?” Luke looked at him blankly.

“The book, moron.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you kidding me?” Tommy stabbed a finger at the picture of the cover. “That book has been lost for over a hundred years. It’s worth two million bucks. We should go get it.”

“Why?”

“Dude!” Tommy said. “The library doesn’t even know they’ve got it. It’s been lost in their basement for decades. They’re not going to miss it.”

Luke looked squarely at him. “It’s still stealing, bro.”

“Finders keepers, if you ask me,” Tommy said.

“Yeah, but—”

“Your share would be a million bucks,” Tommy said, and that shut Luke up.

Luke thought of their dingy old house that didn’t even have a TV.

A million dollars would change their lives.

“We’ll have to cross the river,” Luke said.

All the bridges had been closed for over an hour.

B
y the time they got to the footbridge, Luke was soaked, despite the heavy parka that Tommy had lent him. It was too big, and water got into places that water wasn’t supposed to get into. It trickled down the side of his neck and the small of his back. He was glad Tommy hadn’t insisted on their wearing the secret MP3 radios. They would have been soaked and ruined by now.

But water wasn’t a problem. Wet would dry. The thunder and lightning, however, took a little more getting used to.

They say that everything is bigger in America, and the thunderstorms seemed to take pride in that fact. The lightning was hunting in packs, vast sheets of it striking in quick succession in different corners of the sky. At times it was almost constant, the world around them flickering with the strobelike quality of an old black-and-white movie.

Thunder buffeted them from every direction, the waves of sound crashing and building on each other like breakers
on a beach. The distant thunder came in long drumrolls, but the closer claps sounded like explosions.

Usually, after dark, the bridge was lit up with dozens of large white globes standing on tall poles. But tonight the lights were all off. It seemed like an ominous sign, although it probably suited their purpose of trying to sneak across the river without being seen. Luke didn’t know whether the authorities had turned the lights off or whether the water had shorted some wiring somewhere. Along the riverbank on each side, the lights were still on, shimmering through the pounding rain.

Enough light filtered through the trees that he could see the start of the bridge, where it joined the pathway through the park. Something was moving on each side of it, and he realized with horror that it was water.

The water was normally about fifteen feet below the footbridge, but now it was lapping at its underside.

“Get down,” Tommy hissed, and Luke dropped to one knee.

“Contact nine o’clock!” Tommy motioned toward the auditorium to their left. “Gotta be a cop!”

Luke could see a flashlight bobbing and swinging with the gait of the person carrying it, occasionally splaying over the side of the large building.

“We’ve got to go now,” Luke whispered hoarsely, “before he gets to the bridge.”

“Maybe we should …,” Tommy started, but Luke was already moving.

It was probably just his imagination, but the rain seemed worse on the bridge.

On this side of the river, trees overhung the bridge, and in the dim light he could see tree trunks sprouting out of the water where the riverbank used to be, swaying with the motion of the river. Their leaves and branches reached down, clutching at Luke and Tommy with spiny twig fingers, then pulling back, only to reach for them again, a little closer each time.

They crept across the blackened footbridge, the sounds of the river right at their feet. The putrid smell Luke had noticed earlier in the day was much stronger now. The river reeked like a sewer.

“Who farted, dude?” Tommy said. “That’s disgusting.”

Luke glanced back to see not one, but two police officers silhouetted by the lights in the park beyond the bridge.

They reached the center of the span, heads bowed against the rain. Here in the middle of the river, the wind was in a fury, hurling blasts of water at them as if trying to sweep them from the bridge.

Lightning flashed again, right on the riverbank, not three hundred feet downstream. It struck a tree, and there was a crack, followed by a strange creaking noise, audible even above the crashing thunder and the rush of the water, as about half the tree split away and toppled into the river.

Immediately, flashlights came on along the opposite bank. More police. Two of them, spotlighting the riverbank, searching for the source of the noise.

“Contact front!” Tommy said, twisting his head toward Luke to be heard.

Luke looked behind him. They were stuck. They couldn’t go forward and they couldn’t go backward.

“Well, this was one of your better ideas,” Tommy said.

“I thought it was your idea,” Luke said.

He glanced both ways desperately, hoping the officers would head off somewhere. But clearly they were there to stop anybody stupid enough to try crossing the bridge.

“We’ll have to wait for them to leave,” Luke shouted, the wind swallowing up the words and spitting them upriver.

Even as he spoke, there was an angry surge, and black water spilled across the concrete base of the bridge, flowing around Luke’s shoes in the darkness.

“I hope you can swim,” Tommy yelled.

His words were cut off by another brilliant flash of light, searing their eyeballs. Then two giant hands of thunder shook the sturdy bridge and them with it.

At that moment, the moon appeared through a hole, a deep tunnel in the clouds. It wasn’t a full moon, and it came and went as dark cloud curtains were drawn again and again across its face, but it still lit them up like actors on a stage.

“Go away!” Luke shouted at the sky, certain that the police would see them. “Bad moon! Go away!”

More water surged across the base of the bridge. The river was rising faster now, and as he watched, the bridge beneath their feet disappeared into the river, leaving just the handrail to either side sticking up out of the water.

Luke grabbed the rail for balance and Tommy did the same. Water gushed up over the tops of Luke’s shoes.

“We gotta get moving,” Tommy yelled.

“You think?” Luke shouted back.

They’d made it only a couple of yards when that bad
moon burst back into life. There was a shout from the far bank, and two powerful flashlights illuminated them like prison fugitives.

There was shouting, too, and although Luke couldn’t make out the words, it was pretty obvious what they wanted.

He gripped the handrail, fighting to keep his feet against the rush of the water, which now reached up just below his knees.

Tommy slipped and fell, and if not for Luke’s hand on the neck of his parka, he would have gone under.

Luke hauled him back up and clutched the handrail with both hands, inching his way forward.

Then Luke’s footing went. One minute he was standing, and the next minute his knee cracked into the struts of the handrail with a sickening thud, and a jagged spear of pain shot up his leg. He kept hold of the handrail, though, thinking that if it weren’t for that, they’d be a mile downstream by now. He hauled himself back to his feet, his shoes jammed up against the bottom of the handrail by the force of the water.

Tommy stopped, grasping the railing, unable to move.

Around them the river was not simply flowing; it was seething and boiling, massive currents pushing their way to the surface.

“I’m stuck,” Tommy yelled.

“Hand over hand,” Luke shouted. “Just pull yourself along!”

Tommy reluctantly took one hand off the rail and replaced it in front of the other. Luke put a hand on his friend’s shoulders to steady him and urged him on.

They moved what seemed like an inch at a time, but still they moved. The surge of the water seemed to lessen as they neared the far bank.

The cops waded into the river and extended their hands to help them the last few feet, dragging them out of the water. They didn’t let go until Luke and Tommy were up onto higher, drier ground, away from the river and the bridge approach.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” one of the police officers shouted into Luke’s face.

“Are you completely insane?” asked the other one.

“We … we were …,” Tommy stammered, gasping for breath.

“We got lost,” Luke said.

“Lost!” It was clear the police officer didn’t believe him. “I want your names and addresses, and I want to know what you were really doing out there.”

“We were looking for my sister,” Tommy said, and Luke glanced sharply at him. “She’s only six.”

“Your sister? Where?”

The alarm on the police officers’ faces was instant.

“She was behind us,” Tommy said, waving a hand in that general direction.

The police officers turned their lights back to the river, forgetting about Luke and Tommy, their concentration on the dark, rushing waters that consumed the footbridge.

The moment the police officers turned, Tommy and Luke ran, sprinting through the rain up the sloping path that led away from the river. There were shouts and footsteps behind
them, but Tommy and Luke were smaller and quicker and had a head start. They ducked off the path into the cover of some trees and crouched, watching as heavy boots thundered up the pathway.

As soon as the cops were past, they cut back down through the trees to the river path and, with water lapping at their feet, ran down the pathway until they reached a covered entrance to one of the university buildings. Out of the rain and away from danger—for the moment, at least. They both collapsed onto a set of concrete stairs that led up to the doorway.

Tommy whooped with excitement. “You think we lost them?”

Luke nodded.

“How’s the leg?”

“Just a bang. Bit of a gash. I’ve had worse.”

“You’d better rinse it off real good. That water smelled like seven sorts of sh—”

“Shoop shoop.” Luke grimaced. “Tasted like it, too.”

“I told you not to drink the stuff,” Tommy said.

“What can I say? I was thirsty,” Luke said.

“We were lucky twice tonight,” Tommy said. He leaned back on the stairs and stretched out his legs. “With the river, then with the cops.”

“True that.” Luke reached out of the shelter and cupped his hands, collecting some rainwater. He rinsed his mouth and spat it out, trying to clear the acrid taste from his tongue.

“Shame about the book, though. I was really looking forward to finding it,” Tommy said.

“Me too.”

“I mean, if it was up to me, I’d still be heading in there, but with your sore leg …”

“My leg’s sweet as, bro,” Luke said.

“And all the water you swallowed and everything?”

“No, I’m good.”

“I mean, I’d be going for it. But I don’t blame you if you want to just head home,” Tommy said.