Enter the Zombie Read online

  “I think we all do. I still have nightmares where pig pieces rain from the sky.” She shuddered. “But this will prove to you that everything is safe.”

  I watched as she flipped a switch on the side of the machine and turned a dial all the way to the right. Last time, the milk started bubbling like it was simmering on a stovetop. Then, the pig exploded. It wasn’t a live pig, but it was still a juicy one. It was a good thing nothing can make me feel sick to my stomach, because that shower of pork parts would definitely have made me throw up for a solid week or two.

  This time, the milk didn’t even ripple as it filled with tiny bubbles. Better yet, the pig didn’t blow up. The three of us—me, Dr. Cushing, and Mr. Murphy—stared at the perfectly calm surface of the milk as the liquid turned clear.

  “All the calcium is getting absorbed by the bones,” Dr. Cushing said. “Give me a hand, please, Peter.”

  “It works,” I said as she and Mr. Murphy lifted the pig out of the vat. “This is great.”

  “And it’s safe,” she said. “Abigail and I went over the calculations a dozen times, just to make sure we didn’t miss anything. But I’m not going to trust the calculations by themselves, even though the pig appears to be fine. I need an hour to run some tests on our subject, to make sure everything is okay. And I’ll have to refill the vat.”

  Finally, I’d get my bones strengthened. That was great. I was tired of my fingers snapping off like overbaked pretzel rods. A brittle spy isn’t anywhere near as useful as a sturdy spy.

  Dr. Cushing started examining the pig. “I don’t want to take any chances. I’ll run a full set of tests.”

  “No point waiting here,” Mr. Murphy said. “Come on, lad—let’s find something more interesting to do for the next hour.”

  3

  Odds and Ends

  I followed Mr. Murphy out of the lab. “Hey, once my bones are strong, maybe someone here can teach me karate.” I threw a punch at an imaginary enemy. “Every spy should know self-defense.”

  He laughed. He did that a lot. “I think I can find better ways for you to spend your training time. There are plenty of thugs and musclemen available. We need stealth and guile. You’re a lurker, not a fighter.”

  “But why can’t I be both? It would be so cool.” I chopped at the air.

  “Well, we certainly built this entire organization so you could have cool experiences,” Mr. Murphy said. “After we teach you karate and how to drive a race car, would you like us to send you to the moon?”

  I finished off my imaginary enemy with a kick. “Only if you promise I can strap you to the outside of the rocket.”

  Mr. Murphy laughed even louder. “It appears you don’t have any need of karate. You already know how to defend yourself.”

  Instead of going to his office, we went to the room with the large video screen. Mr. Murphy pointed to the couch. “I want you to understand everything about this mission.”

  “No secrets?” I asked. Mr. Murphy didn’t like to tell anyone anything unless they absolutely needed to know it.

  “I never said that. There will always be secrets. But I want you to have enough background information so you’ll do the right things when you’re approached.”

  Before he could say anything more, a small intercom on the desk beeped.

  “Go ahead,” Mr. Murphy said.

  “We need high-speed transport for three agents from Ulner Airfield,” the voice said.

  “Got it.” Mr. Murphy turned toward me. “This will just take a moment.” He went to a table by the wall, flipped open a laptop, and pulled up a website. He typed some stuff, then closed the laptop. “Okay, get comfortable. We have a lot to cover.”

  I plopped down on the couch while he picked up the remote and hit some buttons.

  The screen divided into squares, like a checkerboard. “These are the RABID operatives we’ve identified, thanks to the work you’ve done.” Faces popped into all the squares.

  “That many?” I asked.

  “It might seem like a lot, but we’ve uncovered only a small portion of them. There are far more still out there. But this isn’t about numbers. It’s about patterns.” He pushed another button. “For example, let’s divide them by age.”

  As I watched, the faces moved to different spots on the screen. I could see that the youngest ones were on the left and the oldest were on the right. “It looks pretty even,” I said.

  “Definitely. Age tells us nothing. Let’s look at where they were born.” He pushed a button. There was another shift. “Education.” Another shift. “Voting record.” He went through a dozen different categories.

  “Nothing seems to mean anything special,” I said.

  “Correct.” Mr. Murphy lowered the remote. “Because this is the wrong way to analyze the information. I could spend years trying to think up the right connection and never come close. Let’s reverse the approach, and have the computer search for common links that occur at unusual levels.”

  I wasn’t totally sure what that meant, but I figured Mr. Murphy would explain it.

  The faces faded away, along with the squares. Words and numbers flashed across the screen. Each one flickered on just long enough for me to read it. I noticed words like COLLEGE, AUTOMOBILE, and SIBLINGS. Then one set of words flashed on and stayed there: BRAINY BRAWNY.

  More words and some numbers showed up under that line:

  Participation in BRAINY BRAWNY competition

  7 of the 64

  Portion of group: 10.9%

  Probability: .005%

  I stared at Mr. Murphy. “It was just seven of them. Why’s that a big deal?”

  “Seven out of sixty-four. As you see, that’s more than one out of every ten. How many people that you know have competed in Brainy Brawny?” he asked.

  “None, until now.”

  He nodded. “If you grabbed a thousand people at random, how many do you think would have ever been in Brainy Brawny?”

  “I don’t know. A couple?”

  “Right. A couple. At most. Think about it. Finding seven in a group of sixty-four would be like finding out that over one hundred of those thousand had been in it.”

  I wasn’t as good with numbers as Abigail, but I started to see what he meant. It’s hard to imagine even one or two people out of any random group of a thousand might have entered Brainy Brawny. But seven of the sixty-four RABID agents that BUM uncovered had been in it. That was a lot. And that was just from the agents we knew about. “So that’s the pattern,” I said. “That’s how you know RABID gets people from Brainy Brawny.”

  “Exactly.” Mr. Murphy hit another button. “Then we worked from the other direction. We analyzed every person who’d ever participated in Brainy Brawny, and graphed that against any sort of criminal involvement later in life. We figured some of RABID’s operatives would have been caught doing something bad, even if they weren’t linked with RABID at the time they were arrested. They do some pretty evil things.”

  I looked at the graph. “Wow. I can see why you want me to enter Brainy Brawny.”

  “And to get recruited by Baron von Lyssa.”

  “What’s he look like?” I asked.

  “We don’t know. Not yet. Right now, all we know is his name. But we’ll know much more about him as soon as your Brainy Brawny performance draws him to you. And you’ll have helped deal a crippling blow to RABID. As I said, without him, they’ll be like a snake without a head. They might writhe and wriggle for a while, but eventually they’ll die. And that, lad, is enough, all by itself, to make everything we’ve done to get to this point worthwhile.”

  “Can’t you just grab him when he comes to watch the contest?”

  “That would certainly make things easier,” Mr. Murphy said. “But Baron von Lyssa would never go to the competition. He’ll just wait until the results are made public. He probably won’t even approach you, himself, for the first contact. The man takes no risks. But he also doesn’t let anyone else do the recruiting. You can be su
re, once a meeting is arranged, that he’ll be there. And so will we.”

  A moment later, Dr. Cushing called us back to the lab. When we got there, she handed me a bathing suit. “No point getting your clothes wet.”

  “Thanks.” I went to a bathroom down the hall and changed. On the way back to the lab, I kept thinking about the messy moment when the first pig had exploded. I could understand why Dr. Cushing still had nightmares. But I trusted her. And I really trusted Abigail. She’d never put me in danger.

  “It might tingle a little,” Dr. Cushing said as I stepped into the vat of milk.

  “If it makes my bones stronger, I don’t care if it burns.” I leaned back in the vat and let my body sink below the surface. I heard a click as Dr. Cushing threw a switch. Then I heard a hum. My whole body started to tingle. I’m glad she’d warned me about that. My fingers grew warm—just like when Dr. Cushing had run the machine on my hand. So did my toes. The tingle spread to my arms and legs, and then to my whole body. I liked it.

  The milk around me filled with tiny bubbles. If I’d been able to feel them, I’m sure the bubbles would have tickled. The milk grew clearer. Finally, after a couple of minutes, the milk was as clear as water. The tingles faded. The hum of the machine grew fainter, then died completely.

  I looked over at Dr. Cushing. She nodded and waved a hand to let me know it was okay to get out.

  I sat up and clenched my fist. It was hard to tell if there was any difference in my bones. I grabbed my little finger and bent it. It didn’t break. I pulled at my wrist. My arm felt strong. “I think it worked.”

  “So do I.” Dr. Cushing handed me a towel. “There’s a shower room down the hall to the left, just around the corner.”

  “Thanks.” I toweled myself off enough to stop the dripping, then grabbed my clothes and headed for the shower.

  Strong bones.

  That was great. Of course, I was still dead, and slowly rotting. I stared at my fingers. They were pale and flaky. I’d seen healthier flesh spread out on the crushed ice in the fish market. I checked my face in the mirror. It was pretty pale, too. But this was the first time since I’d been splashed with Hurt-Be-Gone that any part of my half-dead condition had improved. One problem at a time, I guess.

  When I got back to the lab, Dr. Cushing tapped my nose with her forefinger, and then my ear. “Remember, some parts of you aren’t bone. So don’t go trying to be Superman.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  Mr. Murphy held up a padded box with a small dial in the upper corner. “Punch this,” he said. “It will measure how strong your bones are.”

  “Will it explode?” I asked. A lot of BUM’s devices seemed to blow up when they weren’t supposed to.

  “Stop being so tedious. It’s not even electronic.”

  I hauled off and socked it. The box shattered. Mr. Murphy looked down at the broken pieces on the floor. “It seems your bones are even stronger than we’d expected.”

  “That was the one possible side effect Abigail and I discussed,” Dr. Cushing said. “Though it’s obviously not a harmful one.”

  “Not harmful to me.” I flexed my fingers and stared at my fist. The skin over my knuckles looked a little flattened. I squeezed it back into shape. It felt sort of squishy, like grapes that had fallen into the bottom of the fridge and stayed there for a month or two. Even so, this was definitely an interesting development. Who’d have guessed a dead kid could end up with a powerful punch. “This is pretty lucky timing. Strong bones could come in handy during the tournament,” I said.

  Something flickered across Mr. Murphy’s face. But then he smiled and said, “I suspect it might.”

  With Mr. Murphy, I always assumed he had secrets. I wondered what he wasn’t telling me.

  4

  Enter the Bully

  Abigail and Mookie met me as soon as I left the museum.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “How’d it go?” Mookie asked.

  “Not good.” I limped a couple of steps, then screamed in pain and dropped to my knees. I wrapped my arms around my chest and shuddered like I was in danger of falling apart. Mookie’s eyes got wide, but Abigail didn’t fall for it.

  “Nice try,” she said. “I guess it’s safe to assume the machine worked.”

  “Yeah. It worked perfectly. Better than perfectly.” I got back up. “My bones are stronger than ever. Watch this.”

  I walked over to a parking meter and punched it. The meter vibrated on its pole like it had been whacked with a baseball bat.

  “Cool!” Mookie said.

  “Careful,” Abigail said. “Your bones are stronger, but your skin still can’t heal.”

  “Good point.” I realized I couldn’t go around hitting things all the time. I didn’t want my bones popping through my skin.

  “Even so, I’m happy for you,” Abigail said.

  “And we don’t have to worry about you snapping in half anymore,” Mookie said. “You can stop carrying your glue around.”

  “No way.” I patted my pocket. I never left the house without a bottle of the glue. “My bones are stronger, but they could still break. Right?”

  “Right,” Abigail said. “It would just take a lot of force. I think it would be smart to keep carrying the glue.”

  We headed down the street. “You sure you’re okay with the idea of entering this contest?” I asked Abigail. “People will find out you’re smart.” She’d kept her intelligence a secret ever since she’d been badly kidded about it when she was little. Even our friends at our lunch table had no idea Abigail was beyond brilliant.

  “It’ll be fine,” Abigail said. “We won’t be competing at Belgosi. Nobody at school will ever find out about me.”

  Abigail might be really smart, but as we all found out the next day, she definitely couldn’t see into the future.

  We were sitting in science class when the loudspeaker crackled. “The following students please report to the office: Nathan Abercrombie, Hutner Vetch, Abigail Goldberg, Rodney Mullasco, Eddy Mason, and Mort Platner.”

  Mookie thumped his desk. “I hate when they call me that.” His mom and dad had planned to call him Hunter, but they’d messed up the name at the hospital and never bothered to fix it.

  “I wonder what this is about?” I said as we got up from our seats. I knew I wasn’t in trouble. And I definitely wasn’t part of anything that involved Rodney. He was a bully. Eddy was pretty mean, too. He also thought he was the smartest kid in the school. I loved knowing how totally wrong he was about that. Mort was nice enough. He was a great athlete.

  “Wait a minute…,” I said as we walked down the hall. Smart kid … athletic kid … strong kid …

  Click—click—click. The pieces fell together before we reached the office. I looked over at Abigail. She nodded. I could tell she was thinking the same thing. She’d probably figured it out way before I did.

  When we went up to the counter in the main office, the secretary pointed to the conference room. I took a seat at the large rectangular table. We were the first ones there. Mookie and Abigail sat on either side of me.

  I noticed dark crumbs scattered in front of us. Mookie pressed his index finger into some of them, sniffed it, then said, “Brownies. Yum.”

  I grabbed his wrist before he could lick his finger. “You don’t know how old they are.”

  “Hey, stale brownies are awesome.” Mookie looked around. “I wonder if there’s any ice cream. Sometimes they have a little refrigerator in these rooms.”

  Speaking of crumbs, that’s when Rodney, Mort, and Eddy showed up. They sat on the other side of the table. That was good. I liked staying as far from Rodney as possible.

  “If you told on me, I’ll hurt you,” Rodney said to us.

  “Told about what?” I asked.

  He just glared. I stared back. That was easy. I don’t need to blink. Rodney blinked once or twice, but he didn’t look away. I guess he was too stupid to realize he’d been outstared. Finally, he said, “T
here’s something creepy about you.”

  Just then, Principal Ambrose walked in, carrying some sheets of paper in one hand and a thick booklet in the other. He looked tired. But he always looked that way. He was retiring at the end of the school year. I wondered whether tired and retired had anything to do with each other. Either way, he was ready to go. I’d heard he had a big calendar in his office, where he crossed off each day as soon as the last bell rang.

  He raised one hand and waved the sheets of paper at us as he walked to the head of the table. “It seems we have two teams entering the Brainy Brawny competition this year.”

  The six of us exchanged a variety of glances. Rodney smirked. Eddy laughed. Mort shrugged. None of us spoke in words, but we still seemed to be having a conversation.

  Of course, when it came to conversations, Rodney’s favorite topic was always something along the lines of, You’re dead, or I’m going to win. And everything Eddy said pretty much really just meant, I’m smarter than you are, or You’re stupid.

  “Nobody from this school has ever entered before,” Principal Ambrose said. “Not one single team, in all the years I’ve been here.”

  “Cool,” Mookie said. “We’re the first. You must be proud of us. I’ve always been sort of adventurous.” He grinned at the principal. “We should celebrate. Got any ice cream?”

  Principal Ambrose glared at him with enough force that Mookie—who was usually glare proof—wriggled in his seat.

  “The first round is run by the school.” Principal Ambrose paused, as if waiting for his words to sink in. Then he lifted up his other hand and showed us the booklet. “Someone here has to be in charge of this thing. There are a lot of rules and guidelines. Far too many rules.” He opened his hand and let the booklet drop. It smacked against the table like a five-pound bag of flour.

  Okay. Now I got it. He didn’t want the extra work. He might be here until June, but I think he’d already stopped caring about the job.

  “Of course, if one team drops out, there’s no need for the school to run anything.” He stared directly at me, Mookie, and Abigail. “Since this is a contest for the smartest, strongest, and fittest, I think the choice is obvious. Three of you can save yourselves from an embarrassing defeat by dropping out now.”