The Big Stink Read online

  I was just glad to hear from him. He’d gotten roughed up pretty badly by the evil guys from RABID. He didn’t talk about what they’d done, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t nice.

  After my parents went to bed, I slipped out of the house and went to the museum. The door was unlocked, and a lady was sitting at the desk inside. I went in and took the elevator. It wasn’t like any other elevator I’d ever been in. It was more like a roller coaster, or a rocket ship. After I pulled down the lap bar, the car shot toward BUM headquarters. I didn’t even know where that was.

  “Mission?” I asked Mr. Murphy when I got out of the elevator. I was eager for another assignment. My last one had been pretty dangerous, but it was also exciting. It was like I’d been tossed inside a video game.

  “Soon,” he said. “Right now, we have lots more training and field tests. You’re still wet behind the ears.”

  I reached up and felt behind my ear, then held up my finger. “No, I’m not. See?”

  “It’s just an expression. It means you’re still very new at this. You have a lot to learn. That’s why I called you here tonight.”

  “You sent me an e-mail,” I said. “I thought you didn’t do that.”

  He shrugged. “I figured I’d give in to your constant nagging and try it your way. But don’t think you can start making suggestions about everything. As I already mentioned, you’re still not much more than an infant when it comes to spycraft.” He pointed to one of the other elevator doors that lined the wall. “Let’s head out. This is going to be interesting.”

  We took another ride. I went first and waited for Mr. Murphy on the other side. From what I’d seen, some of the elevators had double seats, but most had only one.

  I found myself in the lobby of the Tor Johnson Fan Club National Headquarters.

  “Who’s Tor Johnson?” I asked Mr. Murphy.

  “No idea.” He led me out to the street. There was an empty car at the curb. We got in and Mr. Murphy drove us down the street, following directions from the GPS. After we’d gone a mile or two, he pulled over near a driveway with fancy brick columns on either side. The driveway stretched up the hill and out of sight between two rows of large trees.

  “Here we are.” He got out.

  I didn’t bother asking him what we’d be doing. He never told me anything unless he felt I needed to know. He didn’t seem to understand curiosity.

  Halfway up the driveway, at the top of the hill, we reached a stone wall with a metal gate. Past the bars of the gate, at least another hundred yards away, I saw a mansion. It was three stories high, and nearly as big as the middle school.

  “Cool. Are we meeting someone there?” I wondered whether there’d be a butler.

  “Not quite.” Mr. Murphy unlocked the gate on the wall and swung it out. I noticed he’d used his lock picks.

  When he caught me staring, he said, “It’s always good to keep in practice.”

  As we started to walk through the opening, his knee buckled and he grabbed the gate to keep from dropping to the ground. He let out a groan and gritted his teeth.

  “You okay?” I guess he was still hurting from his time with the bad guys.

  “I’m fine, lad. No need to be concerned. Go ahead. I’ll meet you by that oak tree in a minute.” He leaned over and rubbed his knee.

  I headed toward the tree, which was about twenty yards from the house. Just before I reached it, I saw something racing toward me from the side of the house.

  Guard dogs.

  Three of them. They were dark streaks against the lawn, shooting toward me like homing missiles.

  They didn’t bark. But I could hear low growls.

  I saw another motion out of the corner of my eye and then heard a clank. Mr. Murphy has gone back outside the wall and closed the gate.

  My brain told me to run. I almost listened to it. But then I remembered the first time I’d met a stray dog. I was in town with Dad. I couldn’t have been more than four or five. The dog was wagging its tail, but when it got close, it growled. I turned away. Dad put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t run,” he’d told me.

  I said I was scared.

  “I know,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But dogs chase you if you run. It’s instinct.”

  I’d stayed still. The dog sniffed my leg, then turned and ran off. Dad had stood right next to me the whole time. I knew he’d never let me get hurt.

  Of course, that hadn’t been a guard dog. Or three of them. Either way, unless I thought I could reach the gate before the dogs reached me, it would be a bad idea to run. I was a good runner, but I was pretty sure the dogs would be faster.

  By the time I thought through all of this, the dogs had reached me. They raced up to me like they were eager to start tearing me apart in three different directions. Maybe it had been a mistake not to run.

  6

  Pass the Salt

  I wondered whether there’d be enough of me left to glue together when they were done. I didn’t even want to think about how much it would hurt. When I glue a finger back on, I have this huge flash of pain. It doesn’t last long, but it hurts more than anything I’d felt when I was alive. Gluing all of me back together would be unimaginably horrible.

  But all three of the dogs did the strangest thing. If dogs could shrug, that’s what I’d say they did. They just totally lost interest in me—like someone had flipped a switch and I’d turned invisible.

  For an instant, I wondered whether Mr. Murphy was pointing some sort of invisibility ray at me. I held up a hand. I could see myself. And nothing had blown up yet. So I knew I wasn’t dealing with BUM inventions. They tended to explode.

  I took a slow backward step toward the gate. The dogs, who were trotting to the house, didn’t even look back. I took another step. No problem.

  When I reached the wall, Mr. Murphy pulled the gate open for me. “Excellent. Dr. Cushing predicted this.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the mansion. “What are you talking about?”

  “She was pretty sure that domesticated animals, including trained guard dogs, wouldn’t view you as a living creature. This is splendid. It opens up all sorts of possibilities.”

  “But this wasn’t her idea, was it?” I knew Dr. Cushing would never expose me to danger. She really seemed to care about me.

  “No. I’m proud to say, I thought up the perfect test myself.” Mr. Murphy walked down the driveway.

  I noticed he wasn’t limping. “Wait. You were faking with your knee?”

  “I couldn’t very well walk in there with you, could I? We needed to see how the dogs reacted to you by yourself. And I certainly had no desire to be torn to pieces. I’m glad you found my pain so convincing. In my youth, I actually did consider a career in the theater. I suspect I would have been quite good.”

  I was going to shout at him for tricking me, but the scary thing was that, by now, I was sort of used to him doing stuff like this to me. It wasn’t even close to the worst stunt he’d pulled.

  As we walked away, I asked, “So whose house is this?” I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to go inside. I had a feeling it would have been awesome.

  “No idea,” he said. “We just tracked down the nearest place with guard dogs. It’s not like we’d keep dogs around just in case a dead kid like you showed up.”

  “No. That would be silly.” Of course, half the things BUM did seemed silly. But the other half helped save a lot of people. So I guess I could put up with some silliness. “Are we doing anything else tonight?”

  “No,” Mr. Murphy said. “That’s enough for now.”

  We headed back to BUM. When we got there, Mr. Murphy handed me a book. “You might enjoy this.”

  I looked at the title: Great Spies: Their Secret Stories. “That looks good.”

  “The more we know about the past, the better we can shape the future,” he said. “That’s why we study history.”

  He sounded like Ms. Otranto. But that wasn’t a bad thing.


  I went home from there. I still had a lot of time to kill. So I started reading the book. It was pretty cool. There were all sorts of spies. Some just did one mission. Others spied for years. Some got caught and suffered terrible punishments. The ones I read about had helped our country in all sorts of ways. It felt nice to be part of that, even if almost nobody knew what I’d done.

  I finished half the book by sunrise. I heard Dad drive off early, like he did most mornings. Then I heard Mom go. That was unusual. She liked to be here when I headed out for school. But it was Bear Season, so I guess she was excited about going to Stuffy Wuffy and getting ready to set up all those shelves full of cuteness.

  She’d left me a note and a box of cereal. That was good. If she wasn’t around, I didn’t have to pretend to eat. Since I don’t digest anything I swallow, it’s a good idea for me not to put food in my stomach. Whatever I ate would just stay down there and rot. As I’d learned the hard way, the results could be pretty unpleasant.

  She’d also left me a brand-new Stuffy Wuffy cereal bowl. It’s a good thing I didn’t have any appetite to kill. I put a few flakes of cereal and a splash of milk in the bowl and left it in the sink.

  After my non-breakfast, I headed out to school. As I walked past the neighbor’s house, Spanky, their dalmatian, ran over to me. He stopped right in front of me, panting and looking up. I couldn’t help thinking about the guard dogs. Unlike them, Spanky was about as dangerous as a stuffed teddy bear. Or an unstuffed one, for that matter.

  “Hi, boy.” I reached out to pet him.

  He sniffed my hand, then started licking my fingers like they’d been smeared with peanut butter.

  “Quit it!”

  Spanky kept licking. I pulled my hand away. He whined like I’d stolen his food bowl.

  “I have to go.” I headed down the street. Spanky followed after me, sniffing at my hand.

  I stopped and turned around. “Go home, boy.”

  He cocked his head like he couldn’t believe I didn’t want to hang out with him.

  “Home. Now.”

  He gave my hand another lick. I remembered how he’d almost run away with my thumb after I broke it off.

  “No!” I yanked my hand away. “Bad dog! Go!”

  He left. But he looked so sad, with his head slunk down and his tail drooping, I felt bad about shouting at him.

  When I got to school, Mookie came running up to me, waving a comic book. Abigail was behind him, shaking her head slowly.

  I noticed something flashing. He was wearing sneakers with lights. But they didn’t have tiny little LEDs. They had a small lightbulb—like the kind in a fridge—screwed into each toe.

  “Are those your new sneakers?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Cool, huh?” Mookie said.

  “And they were free?” From what I’d seen, Mookie’s mom never won anything that was really free, or really worth winning.

  “Yeah. Totally. Except we had to buy the bulbs. They gave us an awesome deal on a case of them. I’ve got enough bulbs now to last me for years. But that’s not important. I have something even better to tell you about. I figured out the answer yesterday.”

  I waited for him to continue, but he got a strange look on his face, opened his mouth wide, and let out a monster burp.

  “That’s the answer?” I asked. “I hate to think what the question was.”

  “Sorry. My stomach has been weird ever since I ate that burger. I only had two helpings of pork chops at dinner last night. But forget that. This is so cool. I realized it was crazy hoping I could find a cure for you by watching movies.”

  “I’m glad you finally figured that out,” I said. Mookie had watched every zombie move he could find, hoping to find some clue about how to bring me back to life. “Though I have to admit, the movies helped us figure out how to find the bad guys from RABID when we needed to.”

  Mookie nodded. “Yeah. But they still aren’t going to make you alive again.”

  “For sure.”

  “That’s why I switched to a much better source of information.” Mookie held up an old comic book. “This has all the answers. I found it at the used-book store. You know, the one where the guy yells at you if you don’t buy something.”

  I looked at the cover. Evil Zombie Rebellion. The picture was pretty gory, even for a comic book. Apparently, when evil zombies rebel, body parts go flying. “That’s gonna help?”

  “Yup. I can’t believe how simple it is. The book says you can be cured if I give you salt to eat. Check it out.” Mookie flipped to a page near the end of the comic.

  “Let me see.” I took the book and read the panels.

  The first panel showed zombies running wild through a town. The next showed a lab in a college. In the last panel on the page, a creepy old professor was talking to a young professor. In the balloon over his head, it read: “If a zombie is fed salt, he will instantly come out of his spell.”

  “See?” Mookie said. “It happens instantly. We can cure you right away. How great is that?”

  I had a feeling it wouldn’t be that simple. I turned the page. In the next panel, the old professor was still talking. “The revived zombie will then turn on his creator and kill him.”

  I pointed out that part to Mookie. “Did you happen to notice this little detail?”

  He frowned, leaned closer, and looked at the page. “Oh. I got so excited when I read about the salt that I didn’t bother reading the rest.” He sighed. His head flopped forward until his chin pressed against his chest. But then his head shot up and he said, “Hey—that’s not a problem. Your creator is Abigail’s uncle Zardo. And he’s nowhere near here. So you don’t have to worry about hurting him.”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter where he is. The problem is that this is just a story. It won’t help me.”

  “We won’t know until we try,” Mookie said. “Let’s get some salt.” He raced off.

  “This is crazy, right?” I asked Abigail.

  “Yeah. Even if it happened to be true, which it isn’t, that’s all about the classic type of zombie. That’s the problem. There are at least three kinds of zombies.”

  “Three?” I asked.

  “Sure. First you have the ones from the myths and legends from the Caribbean Islands. Then the movies came along and did all that brain-eating stuff, which they totally made up. And now there’s the third kind.”

  “Me?” I guessed.

  She nodded. “You. You’re one of a kind.”

  Mookie came running back, holding a packet of salt, like the kind you get with fast food. “I snuck into the teacher’s lunchroom,” he said. “Man, they have some weird signs on the walls. Who knew people were so worried about someone not washing a coffee cup?”

  He tore the top off the packet. “Stick out your tongue.”

  I didn’t bother arguing. I stuck out my tongue. Mookie poured out the salt. Then he jumped back.

  “What are you doing?” Abigail asked.

  “I don’t want him to kill me by mistake,” Mookie said. “He might not be totally in control when he comes out of his trance.”

  “Nathan isn’t in a trance,” Abigail said, “and he’s certainly not killing anyone.”

  She was right about that. The salt wasn’t even dissolving. It just sat on my tongue. Without thinking, I swallowed it. Then I jerked my arms, let out a growl, and spun toward Mookie.

  7

  Dare I Wear a Peach?

  “Brains!” I shouted, lurching at Mookie. “Yeek!” He stumbled back, fell on his butt, and let out another monster burp.

  I staggered forward. “Must kill my maker!”

  Mookie scooted back like a dog scratching itself on a carpet. “I don’t have any brains! Ask anyone.”

  “Maker must die.” I took one more step, then started laughing.

  Mookie stared at me for a moment. “Okay, I get it. You’re joking. Right?”

  “Well, after all those zombie jokes you make, can you blame me?”

  “
I guess not. That was a pretty good one. You really fooled me.” He got up and rubbed his stomach. “I almost lost my lunch.”

  “Sorry.”

  He glanced down and said, “I think I might need to change my pants.”

  “Ick,” Abigail said.

  Mookie reached down the back of his pants like Dilby the Digger, except he used only one hand. He felt around for a second, then said, “Nope. I’m okay.”

  “That’s good.” I didn’t want to scare him that badly.

  “I’m glad you’re not going to kill anyone,” Mookie said. “But I wish the cure worked.”

  “Me, too. Thanks for doing all that research.” I guess it was nice he was trying to help me. And even though I knew it wouldn’t bring me back to life, that didn’t mean there wasn’t a small part of me that believed it might work.

  “Don’t give up,” Mookie said. “I got a whole stack of comics to go through. I’ll find the cure.”

  We headed to our classroom. Ms. Otranto and Mr. McGavin had cooked up a lesson for us about the worst kings and emperors of all time. It was actually pretty interesting. Especially when the people decided to get rid of a ruler.

  I tried not to look back at Ridley. So far, I’d managed to avoid attracting his attention again. Ferdinand was out sick today. Probably recovering from being dropped into a puddle. So Ridley needed another victim he could torture until he crumpled. The problem was, I wasn’t a crumpler anymore. Even if I didn’t have a chance, I knew I’d stand up for myself. But it looked like it wasn’t going to be a problem for long. On the news last night, they said our school would be open again by a week from Wednesday.

  After the lesson, we headed out for recess. Mookie, Abigail, and I sat against the building again and watched the other kids. After a while, I looked at my hand and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” Abigail asked.

  I rubbed my fingers against my palm. “My skin’s all dry and flaky.”

  “No problem,” Abigail said. “I have this great hand lotion.” She opened her purse and pulled out a bottle filled with some light-pink gunk. It looked like liquid bubble gum.