Zeke Bartholomew (9 page)

3:47 p.m.

Four hours and thirteen minutes until everything goes kablooey and I'll never get an iPad.

I don't know how long I was out for. It couldn't have been too long, because when I came to I couldn't breathe.

My face was underwater. I lurched up, spat water out of my mouth, coughed, and snorted it out my nose. It was terribly dark, and I couldn't make out much of anything except the acrid smell of smoke from the fire grenade. Ragnarok had been waiting for us.

He'd needed to know where we were. He needed to know we weren't coming after him.

He had Kyle.

I felt an awful pang in my gut when I realized that the sick, molten monster had taken my best friend. And my only hope was…

Sparrow?

“Sparrow!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

I couldn't see her, couldn't see anything, really, so I felt about in the dark. Feeling for something, anything, that would let me know where she was.

“Sparrow!” I shouted again. “Where are you?”

I tripped over a rock. A pile of them actually. I went down in a heap and bashed my elbow.

I rolled over, holding it and rocking back and forth. I'd ruined everything. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't have put my family and friends in danger. And now here I was, sitting alone in the bottom of a destroyed sewer system. My best friend was kidnapped, and the girl who'd saved my life had disappeared.

Then I heard a noise.

Eek.

Eek.

Kids in grade school used to call me that. It started one Halloween night. A kid named Steve Berg (Isabel Berg's brother) had lost both of his front teeth. He tried to call me “Zeke,” but it came out “Eek.” That stuck for far, far too long.

Eek.

“I hear you, Sparrow! Where are you?”

“Here,” came the voice.

I followed the noise to where it seemed to be coming from.

“Speak again!” I said. “I'll follow your voice.”

“I'm over here,” she said. There wasn't much energy in her voice. I had to find Sparrow.

I followed the voice for a minute before I came upon her. My heart sank.

“Oh, no…Sparrow…”

She was lying on the ground, cradling her arm. I remembered that sickening sound when she'd hit the floor. Noticing the angle she was holding it at, I could tell that her shoulder was definitely separated.

But more worrisome was that her entire lower body was buried under rocks. Some big ones. I couldn't even see her legs.

“I tried to pick them up, get them off me,” she said lethargically, “but I couldn't with this.” She gingerly moved her damaged wing.

“Don't move,” I said. “I'll do it.”

I stepped forward and began to remove the rocks from Sparrow's fallen body. Some of them were quite heavy, so I concentrated on the smaller ones first. I began to see clothes, skin. Her uniform was tattered and shredded. There was blood on her legs.

“I'll get you out of here,” I said. “I'm not leaving.”

Once I'd taken the smaller rocks off of her, I started on the larger ones. I couldn't move them on my own. There was a small crack of light that illuminated the hallway just enough for me to go scavenging. I found a sheared-off pipe and used it for leverage.

I propped the pipe under the larger rocks, then pushed down, propelling the rocks off of Sparrow's body. One at a time. I had to be careful. I didn't want a rock to fall back on her.

Once most of the rocks were gone, Sparrow was able to push a few of the smaller ones from her. Finally she was free. I knelt down and leaned in close.

“Are you…okay?” I asked.

Sparrow stood up. She wobbled for a moment, placing her good hand on my shoulder to steady herself.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I should have known.”

“Stop whining, you little baby,” Sparrow said. “Now, help me.”

“Help you what?”

“Get my shoulder back into place.”

“Uh…how exactly do I do that?”

“Just follow my instructions.”

“Okay…”

Sparrow cleaned off a space in the corridor, then lay herself flat on the dirty ground. She took several deep breaths, steadying herself. Then she clutched her elbow to her side and slowly began to raise her arm, almost like a bird's wing. She gritted her teeth, small sounds escaping her lips.

When her arm was at shoulder level, she said, “Now you come in.”

“What do I do?”

“Help me move my hand behind my head. Like I'm trying to scratch my neck.”

I knelt down and gripped Sparrow's hand and arm gently. My heart was beating fast. I slowly began to rotate her arm ninety degrees. When her hand got behind her head, she let out a small yelp. I nearly fell backward.

“Come on, there's no way this is more painful for you than for me.”

“Yesterday I was forgetting to do my calc homework. Today I just got firebombed and I'm sitting in a pile of rubble playing orthopedist. Forgive me if I'm not a robot.”

“Come on, C-3PO. Keep going.”

I moved her arm until her hand was behind her head.

“Okay, now what?”

She replied, “Now pull my hand straight, in the direction of my other shoulder. Do it right, and it should pop the joint back into place.”

“What if I do it wrong?”

“Then you'll probably shred every ligament in my shoulder.”

“Great. No pressure.”

Gently, I began to pull her hand. It was difficult, and her arm was already at an odd angle. Sparrow was sweating, biting her lip. It must have taken every ounce of effort not to scream.

“Keep going,” she breathed.

“It won't go any farther,” I said.

“Yes, it will. That's the point. On the count of three, pull my hand as hard as you can.”

“I don't think I can.”

“One,” she said.

“Wait, let's talk about this…”

“Two,” she continued.

“I'm not that strong.”

“Three!”

On “three” I yanked her hand. There was an awful popping sound, and Sparrow shrieked. She rolled onto her side as I lurched backward into a puddle.

“I'm so sorry!” I said. “I didn't know what I was doing! Are you okay?”

Slowly Sparrow rolled over and got to her knees. She was still clutching her arm. Bracing herself on the wall, she stood up. Gently, she let go of her cradled arm. It hung limp at her side.

Then she began to move it. Rotating, swiveling, raising. She was still clearly in pain, but…

“The joint is back in place.”

“Okay good, because I was this close to yakking,” I said.

“The ligaments have been pulled and stretched, but it's back.”

“Good.”

“Now we need to get the heck out of here, find Ragnarok and Le Carré, and stop SirEebro before it brainwashes every kid on the planet.”

“So you're okay?” I asked, amazed that someone who'd just been buried under hundreds of pounds of rubble could still be such a pain in the butt.

“I'm fine,” she said. I pointed at her arm. “Not bad. Won't need surgery. Long as I can take the pain, it won't hold me back. And, yes, before you ask, I
can
take the pain.”

“I wasn't going to ask,” I said. “Okay, yes, I was.”

“Is there any way we could get back up through the entrance?”

“No way,” I said. “Ragnarok blew the ladder to smithereens. No way we can climb back up.”

“What about the other doors down here? Any chance we could get through them?”

“Far as I know, they're all locked. The only one that isn't is…the GeekDen. Come on!”

The GeekDen might have been far enough away from the blast that it might still be standing. I cautiously stepped through the destroyed brick and rubble, finding my way through the sewers to our hideout. The whole tunnel looked like a bomb had hit it. Ragnarok wasn't kidding with those fire grenades. It was a miracle we were still alive.

“It's up there,” I said. “It's right over…here. Oh, no.”

The door to the GeekDen had been blown in. It was in three pieces. And inside, all of my gadgets, all of my hard work, it looked like someone had, well, thrown a fire grenade inside.

“My stuff,” I said. I went around the bombed-out room, surveying the damage. There was not a single item that hadn't been affected in the blast. My vegetable grinder-upper. Vaporized. I'd invented it as a kid when I didn't want to shovel broccoli into my mouth. You simply inserted a vegetable into it, and it ground the produce into a powder so fine that it could be sprinkled on the rug undetected, for either a vacuum cleaner or family pet to Hoover up.

My automatic textbook reader. For the days when my eyes were just too tired to read thousand-page textbooks. I invented the device to place on a given page, and a robotic voice would read the chapter to you. Saved me from getting Coke-bottle glasses by the age of eight.

And my proudest invention, the HoloZeke. Using light refractions, mirrors, and video footage, once installed in my room it gave off the illusion that I was sitting at my desk, studying, when in fact I was elsewhere, likely in the GeekDen, inventing more amazing gadgets. I always left my bedroom door open a crack so that my dad could peek in, see the HoloZeke, and think I was studying. But in reality I was in another world.

My world. And now that world was destroyed.

“Everything I worked so hard on,” I said, surveying the destruction. I felt like someone had ripped out my heart, spat on it, and laughed at it. I turned to Sparrow. The look on her face was pure apathy.

She shrugged.

“Doesn't matter anyway. It was mostly junk.”

“Junk?” I said, shouting. “This was my life's work!”

“And now it's a pile of trash,” she said. “And we're stuck in here.”

I couldn't even speak, I was so mad. How could she not understand? How could she be so cold?

“Listen, Zeke, I get that you're upset. But the fact is, we wouldn't be in this mess if not for your little den of geeks or whatever. You can sit here and cry over frayed wires. I'm going to figure out how to get us out of here.”

“Right. Just like you figured out how to fix your broken ComLet. Oh, right, sorry. That was
me
.”

“You'll make a great DVD repairman someday,” Sparrow said. “See you on the outside.”

She walked away, cradling her injured arm.

There was no way Sparrow was getting us out of here. Not with a recently dislocated shoulder, and not without the ComLet to signal for help. By the time the police came, Le Carré's plan could be under way and Kyle might be dead. I couldn't listen to Sparrow. She was like everyone else in my life. Telling me only what I couldn't do. It was time to show her what I
could
do.

I stepped into the wreckage that was my old lab. Bits and pieces of metal and wood were everywhere. I had to look at it unemotionally. What was in here? What could I use?

There. In the corner. It was still intact…

And there, under a broken table…a few of those might do the trick…

And that puddle in the corner. It wasn't water, it was a spilled bottle of…

I ran around the lab, gathering bits of shredded and blown-up things, and put them all into the center of the room. I bit my lip. I had no idea if my idea would work, but it was our only chance.

For the next fifteen minutes I gently assembled it. Some things you learned from spy movies; other things you learned as you went. I'd never tried to make one, and would never suggest anyone else do it either. But desperate times call for geeky measures. And when it was finished, and swishing around in the old Drano gallon container I found, I carried it out into the sewer.

There I found Sparrow. She was standing by a wall of rocks, her arm at her side, her good limb trying to pry out some of the massive rocks to create a tunnel.

At this rate, she'd have us out of here by the time teleportation beams were invented.

“Here. Let me try,” I said.

She turned around. First, I had something to show her.

“Here,” I said, handing her a piece of wood wrapped in twine.

“What is that?” she said.

“A splint. For your arm.”

I could tell she didn't want to accept it, but she didn't have much of a choice. I helped her, gritting my teeth as she winced, and strapped the splint to her arm. She sighed.

“A bit better. Thanks.”

“Now for the hard part. Move aside so I can take a look at this.”

“I'm doing fine,” she said, defiantly.

“Listen, Sparrow, or whatever the heck your real name is since you're all secretive and shady and all that. It doesn't mean anything right now. You're hurt. And I can get us out of here. So you can play the ‘I'm an emotionless spy and I can do anything and blah blah blah' game, or we can try to save the world and my best friend.”

She stepped back. “Okay, Brainiac. What do you suggest?”