Beware the Ninja Weenies Read online

  “We can think quite clearly,” the broccoli said. “And feel. We’re quite sensitive. Considering what happens to most of us, that’s not a good thing.”

  “Ouch. You really can feel?” I pictured carrots being peeled and diced, and asparagus being battered and dropped into boiling oil. I shuddered at the image. But at the same time, my mouth watered at the memory of that crispy, tender asparagus. My folks had ordered it once when we’d had dinner at a fancy steak house. It tasted amazing.

  “Yes. We can feel. That’s why I needed to get your attention. You must tell the rest of the humans to stop cooking us and eating us. It’s just not right.”

  “But then we’d starve,” I said.

  “You can eat animals. There are plenty to chose from—mammals, birds, fish.”

  “But don’t they think and have feelings, too?” I’d always hoped that animals didn’t have the same kind of feelings as humans, but I was pretty sure they had some kind of feelings.

  “No way,” the broccoli said. “Animals are the real vegetables. No thoughts. Nothing going on between the ears. They’re really just animated meals. Think of them as movable feasts.”

  I thought about animals. They were cute. If people didn’t eat any vegetables, they’d eat a lot more animals. I didn’t want to eat nothing but meat. I like lettuce on my hamburgers. I didn’t want to eat nothing but vegetables, either. I couldn’t imagine the Fourth of July without hot dogs on the grill. I liked both.

  “Well,” the broccoli said as I tried to figure out how to deal with the situation, “are you going to do something about this, or do I have to talk with someone else?”

  “No need. I’ll do something.” I leaned over and grabbed the broccoli with both hands. The scream it let out when I yanked it from the ground wasn’t pleasant. Luckily, the scream quickly faded to a whimper, and soon after that, slipped into silence. By the time I reached Sally’s house, the clump of broccoli was just another voiceless vegetable.

  Now I had to figure out what to do with it. There was no way I could throw it out. That would have been wasteful and wrong. The world’s first talking vegetable deserved more respect than that. But I really didn’t want to eat it myself—not after we’d had that conversation. I’d hear its voice with every bite. The answer was right in front of me.

  “I brought you something from my mom’s garden,” I told Sally when she answered the door. “I just picked it.”

  “Thanks! It looks delicious.” She took the broccoli from me. “Maybe you can stay for dinner. My dad is grilling steaks.”

  “That sounds great,” I said, “but I don’t think I’ll be hungry for a while. I just had my fill of vegetables.”

  THE ART OF ALCHEMY

  “Come closer.…”

  The voice was a croaking gasp. Lenny hesitated. His great-grandfather was scary enough normally. But now, lying on the hospital bed, the old man looked like he’d already died. Lenny glanced over his shoulder. His parents had gone to the cafeteria. He was alone.

  “Now!”

  The old man shuddered like the shout had taken all his strength. Lenny shuffled forward, wishing he were home or even at school. Anywhere but here.

  “I spent half my life seeking the secret of modern alchemy,” the old man said. He raised his head and repeated the last two words as if they were a magical phrase: modern alchemy.

  Lenny tried to pretend he was paying attention. He’d only met his great-grandfather a couple times.

  “I found it last month.”

  I don’t care, Lenny thought. He had no idea what the old man was babbling about.

  “Riches,” the old man said. “Unbelievable wealth.”

  Lenny started to pay attention.

  “It should have been mine. Vast and endless wealth. It’s too late for me. Take it for yourself.”

  “Take what?” Lenny asked.

  “The secret. It’s all written down.” The old man told Lenny where to find the notebook. Then he died.

  After the funeral, when his parents were cleaning out his great-grandfather’s house, Lenny pried up the loose board in the attic floor and removed the small notebook. He didn’t even look at it until he was alone in his bedroom that evening.

  The pages were filled with diagrams and formulas. None of it made any sense to Lenny. But science wasn’t his best subject. Neither was math. Or English.

  As much as he wanted to be rich, he knew this could all be a waste of time. But the next day, right before school started, he hunted down Marvin Wetburg, the smartest kid in his class.

  All of Marvin’s nerd friends scattered when Lenny walked over. Marvin held up his Yoda lunch box in a shaking hand and said, “Here. I don’t have any money. But you can have my sandwich. It’s free-range chicken on whole wheat with alfalfa sprouts. And chocolate-macadamia cookies.”

  “I don’t want your sandwich,” Lenny said. But he did like the way Marvin trembled. It was nice being powerful. “I want to know something.”

  Marvin lowered Yoda. “What?”

  “There’s a word.…” Lenny paused. He realized he hadn’t written down the word, and it wasn’t on the notebook.

  “I’m good with words,” Marvin said. His trembles had calmed from violent shakes to random twitches, but it was pretty likely his chocolate-macadamia cookies were no longer intact.

  “It’s for getting rich,” Lenny said. “Alka-something.”

  Marvin scrunched his forehead. Then his eyes widened. “Alchemy?”

  “Yeah,” Lenny said, remembering those awful moments in the hospital. “That’s the word. What’s it mean?”

  “Lots of things,” Marvin said. “The alchemists searched for the homunculus, for example. And they explored—”

  Lenny clamped a hand on Marvin’s shoulder. Big words made him want to hit things. “Can alchemy make you rich?”

  Marvin nodded. It looked like he was trying to talk. Lenny let go of his shoulder.

  “Yeah, it can make you rich,” Marvin said. “If it were real. The alchemists wanted to turn lead into gold. Lead is really inexpensive. Gold is really valuable. Anyone who could turn lead to gold would be insanely rich.”

  Insanely rich. “Meet me after school,” Lenny said.

  “Can’t you just hit me now and get it over with?” Marvin asked. “Anticipation is torture.”

  “I’m not going to hit you,” Lenny said. “At least, not if you do what I tell you.”

  Lenny had a hard time keeping his mind on his lessons that day. None of his teachers noticed, since that wasn’t any different from his usual behavior in class.

  After school, Lenny brought Marvin home and showed him the notebook. “Can you build this?” he asked.

  Marvin started to thumb through the pages. It took a long time. Lenny wanted to shake him, but he figured that would just slow things down. Shaking Marvin would be like rebooting a computer over and over.

  Finally, Marvin closed the notebook and said, “I can make this. I actually have most of the parts.”

  “How long will it take?” Lenny asked. He was eager to get rich.

  “A week. There’s a lot of wiring to deal with. It should be finished by Saturday.”

  “Great.” Lenny knew the perfect place to go. There was an old lead mine on the other side of the county park. His class had visited the place on a field trip. The teacher had told them there was still plenty of lead left in the mine, but it wasn’t worth the effort to dig it out. Soon, all that lead would be gold, and it would all be his.

  On Saturday, Lenny met up with Marvin by the park. Marvin had a red wagon with a large piece of plywood in it. A bird’s nest of red and blue wires sat on top of the wood, connecting dozens of small electronic parts, several dials, a clump of steel wool, a flask of clear liquid, and one large battery that looked like it had been borrowed from a riding mower.

  “That’s it?” Lenny asked.

  “Yeah. I made it exactly like the diagrams. I couldn’t test it. It’s still stabilizing, but it sho
uld be ready to use by the time we get to the mine. I really don’t understand how it works, though it definitely performs a transmutation.”

  Lenny clenched his fists. “Transmu…”

  “Never mind.” Marvin headed across the park.

  The path that led to the mine was blocked, but every kid in town knew how to get through it. Lenny carried the machine when the ground got too rough for the wagon. It was heavy, but he was strong.

  “Uh-oh,” Marvin said when they reached the entrance to the tunnel. “It’s kind of wet.” He tapped his foot at the edge of a puddle. There was water all over the floor. “And it’s dark. I won’t be able to see what I’m doing. Maybe we’d better leave.”

  “No way. I’ll build a fire.” Lenny liked fires. And there was plenty of wood right outside. In a couple minutes, he had a fire going, twenty feet from the entrance, where nobody would see the smoke. It didn’t do much for the damp floor, but it warmed the damp, chilly air. “Okay. It’s time to get rich.” He turned toward the nearest wall. “Which part is the lead?”

  “There’s no free lead in a mine,” Marvin said.

  “I have to pay for it?” Lenny asked.

  “No. Don’t be stu—” Marvin choked off the insult and took a hard swallow before speaking again. “My mistake. I didn’t explain it right. The lead is mixed up with other elements and minerals. But once it becomes gold, we can extract it easily enough. Any of that shiny ore would work fine. That’s galena.”

  Lenny pulled a hammer and chisel from his backpack and whacked off a hunk of rock from the wall. He smiled as he imagined the heavy hunk of metal turning into gold.

  “How’s this?”

  “That’s a good start,” Marvin said. He hooked a pair of wires to the piece of rock. Then he rested his finger against a button on the side of the machine. “Ready?”

  “I’ll do it,” Lenny said.

  “Fine.” Marvin stepped away from the machine.

  As Lenny reached for the button, he thought about his great-grandfather, and about the spark of excitement that had allowed the old man to raise his head from his pillows. “Modern alchemy.” Lenny repeated the words he’d heard in the hospital. Then he pushed the button. The machine hummed.

  “What did you say?” Marvin asked.

  “Modern alchemy,” Lenny said. “That’s what this is.”

  The nerd’s body jerked like he was the one connected to the battery. “You idiot!” He turned and raced for the exit.

  Lenny froze, his attention shifting from Marvin’s back to the lump of rock that would become gold very soon. Nobody called him names. Not ever. He was going to pound the nerd. But he was going to make a ton of gold first.

  Marvin was almost at the exit. He spun back toward Lenny. “Run! Hurry! You’re gonna get hurt!”

  For the first time in ages, Lenny had a complex thought. He realized what was happening. The nerd was trying to trick him into leaving so he could keep all the gold for himself. But Lenny wasn’t going to fall for it. How awesome was that? He’d outsmarted a nerd.

  Marvin was still shouting stuff. “I didn’t know it was modern alchemy,” he said. “That’s different. Alchemy—the ancient kind—is turning lead to gold. Modern alchemy is turning water to gasoline. I tried to warn you.” He spun away and dashed out of the tunnel.

  Water to gasoline?

  Lenny looked down. The hunk of rock attached to the wires was still dull and worthless. But the water around it shimmered with rainbow flashes. The shimmer spread, reflecting the light of the fire. All the water on the cave floor changed. The air filled with the smell of gasoline.

  Too late, Lenny decided to run for the exit.

  There was a whumpf, followed by an agonizing wave of heat as the gasoline vapors exploded.

  Marvin, who’d reached the exit, was knocked twenty feet through the air, but he landed in a bed of leaves and escaped without anything more than some major bruises.

  Lenny, on the other hand, was toast.

  MAGNIFYING THE TRAGEDY

  Colton and Ozzie took a break from reading horror comics to go outside and fry some ants with Colton’s new magnifying glass. The magnifying glass was one sixteenth of the Super Science Sleuth Sixteen-in-One Amazing Pocket Tool that Colton’s mother had bought for him in an attempt to get him interested in something useful.

  “Awesome!” Ozzie shouted as he turned an innocent insect into a small, crunchy clump of carbon.

  “My turn.” Colton snatched the magnifying glass out of Ozzie’s sweaty hand. The tool also had a tiny telescope, a microscope, a mirror for flashing secret messages to other super scientists, and a dozen other devices that were, for the most part, incapable of ruining the lives of insects in cruel and creative ways.

  Neither of the boys paid any attention to the jet plane that cruised across the sky, thirty-six thousand feet above them, though either the telescope or binoculars would have given them a good look at it.

  As Colton went to work lowering the local ant population, Ozzie glanced around nervously. “You know what?” he said.

  “What?” Colton asked.

  “If this were a horror story, we’d be in big trouble,” Ozzie said.

  “Yeah.” Colton moved the magnifying glass over his next victim. “Good thing it isn’t.”

  Ozzie nodded. “Real good thing. ’Cause if this were a horror story, you know what would happen, right?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Colton said as he fried another ant. “Somehow, we’d end up getting fried ourselves. An evil giant would pop up with a magnifying glass, or some space telescope would spin the wrong way and zap us with sunlight. Stuff like that is always happening in horror stories.”

  Ozzie reached for the magnifying glass. “Let me have it.”

  “Not yet.” Colton pulled his hand back. The tool wriggled, flashing sunlight off the mirror.

  Far above, the pilot of the jet plane noticed the flash. Briefly distracted from his duties, he bumped the landing-gear switch. He quickly corrected his error. But the stress caused a small piece of metal in the underbelly of the plane, which had already been weakened, to break apart.

  Ozzie glanced all around. “No sign of anything that could fry us,” he said. “Guess we can keep going.”

  “Guess so,” Colton said. “I’m glad we aren’t in a horror story.”

  “My turn.” Ozzie made another grab for the magnifying glass. This time, he was successful. He heard the distant roar of jet engines, but didn’t even bother to look up.

  As the metal piece broke from the underbelly of the plane, a flap opened near the tail section. Fifty gallons of blue liquid from the holding tank of the jet’s toilet spilled out, instantly freezing in the biting cold of the upper atmosphere.

  The frozen block of sludge, pulled by gravity and flung by the momentum of the plane, plummeted toward the ground in a perfect trajectory for a close encounter with two boys and sixteen tools.

  “Huh?” Ozzie said as a shadow fell across the lens of the magnifying glass. He glanced up just in time to see that there was no fire involved in his inescapable and immediate doom. No sunlight. No evil giant with a magnifying glass. No out-of-control space telescope. There was just a rock-hard chunk of really gross blue ice about to smack into him and Colton at high speed, and crush them like bugs.

  Some ants died, too. But the rest of them, those outside the range of the impact crater, were left in peace.

  SWEET DREAMS

  It’s really not a good idea to annoy a witch.

  We didn’t mean to. All Stacy and I wanted to do was peek into the old woman’s house and catch her doing something witchy, like putting bat wings into a kettle or turning her cat into a person.

  Instead, we got caught.

  We must have jumped at least three feet in the air when the witch’s door flew open. I wanted to run, but I was too scared to move.

  “Ah, what do we have here?” she said. “Two lovely young ladies decided to pay me a visit. What a pleasant surprise. Come in.�
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  “Uh, we can’t,” I said.

  “Have to get home,” Stacy said.

  “Well, it would be rude of me to let you leave without gifts.” The witch reached into the side pockets of her skirt and pulled out two small paper bags. She thrust one at me. I grabbed it. It felt like a sack of pebbles. Stacy took the other bag.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Candy,” the witch said. “Simply irresistible candy.”

  I peeked inside. The bag was filled with jelly beans. Mixed aromas of fruit, honey, and spices teased my nose.

  “Go on,” the witch said. “Run off. Scat.”

  We scampered off the porch. As we reached the sidewalk, the witch called after us, “Oh, one more thing. Whoever finishes her bag first will die.” She let out a cackle that scratched down my spine like a razor-sharp fingernail.

  I skidded to a halt and spun around, not believing I’d heard her right. “Die?” I asked.

  She smiled even wider and nodded. “Die. D-i-e. So eat slowly.”

  Stacy let out a whimper and raced away. I followed her. As soon as we turned the corner, she said, “I’m getting rid of mine.” She tossed her bag on the ground.

  I threw mine down, too. I knew littering was bad, but dying struck me as worse.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Stacy said.

  “Yeah. Good idea.”

  But as we walked down the street, it felt like my guts were attached to the bag by a fishhook on a rubber band. I tried to keep going, but after two blocks the pain was so bad, I almost fell to my knees. I clutched my stomach and moaned. Stacy moaned, too.

  I staggered backward. The pain faded a bit.

  I took a couple more steps toward the bags.

  The pain was definitely going away. To test it, I moved toward Stacy. The pain grew worse.

  “We can’t leave the bags,” I said. “I’ll get them.”

  I grabbed the bags and did something I’m not at all proud of. I gave Stacy my bag. There was no way she could tell. They looked the same.

  I didn’t want to die. And I remembered the witch’s words. Not just the ones promising us that whoever ate her candy first would die. But the other part. Those two words: irresistible candy.