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  “Good one, Brady, but think how many mammoths went to the edge and didn’t fall in. Remember, our dads explored abandoned gold mines around Lead when they were teenagers, which is way more extreme than this. Those old mines can cave in at any second. Stay where you are. I’ll go first.”

  I pointed my lantern beam at Quinn’s footing as he started along the ledge around the right side of the pit. Step by careful step, he made it all the way. “No problem!” he called over the roar of the waterfall.

  “My turn,” I said without a whole lot of confidence. I turned around and looked at the dog. “Attila, am I actually going to do this?”

  Attila barked. Whether that was intended as warning or encouragement, I couldn’t tell.

  Quinn kept his beam trained on the ledge in front of me. I visualized every step I would have to make. “Here goes nothing,” I said, and started across. I had to make myself keep breathing. I’d never concentrated so hard in all my life.

  I was halfway across when it happened. I slipped. Just slipped, and my flashlight went flying. With a yell, I went over the edge, or half of me did. I was on my stomach and sliding down, losing inches every second. Pretty quick, all I had left on the ledge was my elbows, forearms, and fingers. I probed with my feet for something to step on, but there was nothing underneath me but air.

  My body weight was pulling me down, and I lacked the strength to pull myself up. Quinn was working his way back to me, but he wasn’t going to make it in time. “I’m coming!” Quinn yelled. “Just hang on!”

  Can’t last that long, I thought. “Attila!” I cried. “C’mon, boy, come here, Attila.”

  Attila whined, then crept closer. Quinn could see what I already knew—the dog was my only chance. Quinn kept his light trained on us. It was getting impossible to hang on any longer.

  My eyes met Attila’s. He knew what I wanted, but he was afraid, and retreated a little. I was sure I was done, but then he moved closer yet and leaned down to me. I grabbed that big spiked collar of his, grabbed and hung on with one hand and then both.

  Which left us both stuck in limbo. I was dangling above that bottomless pit, and it was all Attila could do to hold his ground.

  The pull of the void became stronger and stronger, irresistible as a black hole in deep space. I heard claws scraping on wet stone. Attila was slipping. I took a sudden drop, and he almost came over the edge. I was dragging him down with me.

  With a fierce glint in his eye, the war dog began to pull with a power that defied understanding. He put it into reverse and dragged me up and over and onto the safety of the ledge.

  On my hands and knees, Quinn’s light on us all the while, I followed Attila back to safety. I lay there trembling and gasping, completely spent, as Quinn traversed the slippery rim of the sinkhole and finally joined us. “That was insane, Brady!”

  “My inhaler,” I wheezed. “It’s in my backpack—outside pocket. I feel a bad one coming on.”

  “All that strength you got from Fred, it really is gone.” Quinn found my inhaler for me and I brought it to my mouth. Three or four puffs, and my airway began to open up.

  Either the medicine held off the attack, or this wasn’t asthma. Terror could have accounted for it. “Man I’m cold,” I said, and struggled trembling to my feet. “Let’s get out of here, Quinn.”

  A thunderstorm greeted us as we emerged from the Halls of the Dead. Rain never felt so good. We were back in the world, back among the living.

  We hustled across the mountainside and through the down timber in the rain. Unfortunately, my encounter with Fred’s microbes didn’t seem to be over. My fingertips and my toes and the tips of my ears and my nose were buzzing again, painfully this time. Even worse, they were going numb, which was new. I slipped and fell. As I got to my feet, Attila sniffed my hands, whatever that was about.

  The rain quit just as we got to our bikes. We stripped off our muddy rain gear and put it away. It was early evening. Mount Harney and the Needles were under the span of a huge rainbow. “Sorry about what happened back there,” Quinn said. “I didn’t know when to quit. We came this close to losing you.”

  “That’ll be our secret,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “I don’t think I ever will.”

  “Well, we lived through it. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ right?”

  We jumped on the bikes and put the hammer down. In Custer, we ate burgers at the Purple Pie Palace. Attila waited outside where he could keep an eye on me through the screen door.

  It was getting dark, almost 9:00, as we neared home. Attila peeled off at the Carvers’ driveway. “Thanks for saving my life,” I told him. “You’re stronger than I ever would have guessed.” My new friend cocked his head and looked at me quizzically, then bounded for home.

  20

  Promise Me One Thing

  THE SILENCE AS WE opened the door to my house felt spooky, at least to me. My dad would be gone for a couple more days with Uncle Jake. I found myself missing the rest of the family way over in Iowa.

  I took a casserole from the freezer and we heated it up. After we ate, Quinn wanted to shoot some hoops by the yard light. I think he wanted to see if I could still dunk. I was pretty sure I couldn’t. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Weird.”

  “What do you mean, ‘weird’?”

  “Just, weird.” I didn’t want to tell him about the numbness, which was getting worse. It was traveling up my arms and legs.

  “Like, sick?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good.”

  Even my scalp was starting to feel numb. Fred’s microbes were definitely doing something new. Not knowing what was going to happen next was getting scary. I let my mind run, and it landed in a horrifying place.

  I remembered that we had some antibiotic pills upstairs, from when I’d gotten strep back in January. Chances might be slim to none that they would work against germs from Mars, but I might as well give them a try. I went upstairs and took two. I came downstairs looking pretty worried, not even trying to hide it. I guess I was ready to talk. “What’s the matter?” Quinn asked.

  I shrugged and said, “I’ve just come up with a wild paranoid theory about what’s going on.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Okay, it goes like this. Maybe I was right—whatever I got from Fred really is an infection.”

  “Go on.”

  “Let’s say it’s a disease, and it goes through different stages. In the early stages, the extremophile bacteria go wild and infect every cell in your body, and that gives you—how would I describe it—supercapability.”

  “Good word…Carry on.”

  “Your immune system reacts by mounting a counterattack.”

  “Sounds likely. Then what?”

  “The alien extremophiles protect themselves by going dormant.”

  “Like they were dormant for millions of years while Fred was flying around in space?”

  “Yeah, like that. Here’s the worst part of my theory. The last couple days, the alien microbes have been exchanging genetic information with every cell in my body. So, in the stage that’s coming, it’s not only Fred’s microbes that are going to go dormant. They’re going to take me with them.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re afraid you’re going to go dormant for millions of years?”

  “I’m just trying to visualize the stages. Tell me what’s wrong with my theory.”

  “It might be a little far-fetched. I mean, what are the odds you’re going to go dormant?”

  “Or dead…”

  Quinn yawned a huge yawn. “Somehow I doubt you’re going to wake up dead tomorrow, Brady. You always did have an overactive imagination. Seems more likely Fred’s ’crobes are just feeling wimpy, kind of sitting out a quarter on the bench. Tomorrow morning they’ll be back in the game, and you’ll be slammin’ and jammin’. Girls will be tearing the shirt off your back.”

  “Just promise me one thing, Quinn.”

&n
bsp; “You look all serious all of a sudden.”

  “I am serious. Let’s say the Martian bacteria win out, and I go totally dormant.”

  “‘Totally dormant’—what would that look like?”

  “Maybe it would look like death. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “That would be insane. You mean, everybody would think you were dead, only you really wouldn’t be, you’d only be dormant.”

  “Hello, that’s what I’ve been saying. I wouldn’t be totally dead.”

  “If I was in your shoes, I sure wouldn’t want to get cremated.”

  “Or get an autopsy.”

  “An autopsy on a live guy. That’s just grotesque, Brady.”

  “Maybe so, but stick with this a minute. Let’s say I die in my sleep.”

  “Quit talking like that, dude!”

  “Let me finish. You know they’d do an autopsy to find out the cause.”

  “They’d probably figure it was your asthma.”

  “They’d cut me open to make sure. While I was still alive.”

  “You’re creeping me out.”

  “Take a wild guess who would be dissecting me.”

  “Old man Carver! What a nightmare, Brady!”

  “I know. Actually, I’ve been having that nightmare for years.”

  “Holding out on me, eh? Tell me about it.”

  I knew I was ready to spill this awful stuff, and I launched into the scary details. I had his attention. My cousin was enjoying this like you would a good horror show, and he never interrupted.

  “Awesome,” he said when I was done. “That was strangely weird, terribly twisted, and horrifically bizarre. You know what, I always thought you had it made down here in Hill City. Your thing with the Carvers is deeper than I ever guessed.”

  “So I want you to promise me one thing, Quinn.”

  “Okay, I promise. Now tell me what it is.”

  “If this suddenly gets me, and I go down, and everybody agrees I’m stone-cold dead, you won’t let old man Carver do an autopsy.”

  “Not let him? He’s the coroner.”

  “You’ll find a way, no matter what. Promise?”

  “I already did.”

  “Promise again.”

  “You got it,” Quinn said. “No matter what it takes, I will not under any circumstances let Daddy Carver—or anyone else for that matter—cut you open, on account of how you might only be dormant. Is that good enough?”

  “Thanks. Now I can rest easy.”

  “But not in peace, you doofus.”

  “I think I’ll crash. I’m wasted beyond words.”

  “I’m glad you’ve finally run out of them. Before you go to sleep, I suggest you turn off your mind.”

  “I’ll try,” I assured him. With that, I dragged myself upstairs, literally. My legs were pretty much numb. I looked over my shoulder. Quinn hadn’t been watching me go, or he would’ve asked why I was lurching like Frankenstein. He had the TV on.

  Soon as I lay down, it was like I’d grabbed hold of a high-voltage electrical wire. It flipped me from my side onto my back. For good measure, here came a bolt like lightning that seared me through and through. Then it shut off. I lay there stiff as a beetle in a bug collection. Here it comes, I thought. The dormancy.

  The sensation that came next is almost impossible to explain. It felt like every cell, every atom in my body was being rearranged, melted down and rearranged. Maybe it was something like when a caterpillar spins a cocoon and then breaks itself down into goo, before its metamorphosis. The only question was, What was next?

  21

  Introducing Destructo

  WHAT CAME NEXT WAS the morning, waking up like normal and finding myself among the living. “You survived the night,” Quinn observed with a grin. He was taking waffles out of the toaster oven.

  I thought about filling him in on the new and horrible things that had happened, but I was all confused. Maybe it was over. “Give me five, I’m still alive,” I joked instead.

  When it came to my health, I’d always been secretive as a ferret. It about killed me once to ask a pharmacist what to do about athlete’s foot. I wouldn’t have, except it was driving me so crazy I was considering amputation.

  Quinn grabbed the syrup and went to chowing down on his waffles. I detected a smirk. He thought I was an amusing case, all right.

  The phone rang and I jumped for it. I hoped it was Wyoming or Iowa calling. Turned out it was next door, the Carvers. It was Buzz. “Hey, Brady, guess what?”

  “What, Buzz?”

  “We found your backpack yesterday afternoon, on the bottom of Pactola. Snagged it with my dad’s drag hook.”

  “I kind of thought you might give that a try,” I said cautiously.

  “No wonder your backpack went down so fast, eh, Brady?”

  I didn’t say a thing, just waited.

  “We’ve been to the museum. We even talked to the meteorite expert, Dr. Rip. He said you didn’t even tell him you’d lost it.”

  “I couldn’t stand to.”

  “It’s valuable, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so? He said it’s from Mars! First you were holding out on us about it being a meteorite, and now we find out it’s from Mars and worth a boatload of money!”

  I hesitated, wondering where to go from here. I was glad it wasn’t Mean Max I was talking to. With Buzz there was always a chance he’d cut me some slack. “Thanks a lot,” I said. “I really appreciate you guys finding it for me.”

  “Hey, not so fast, Brady. We’ve got just as solid a claim as you do. Haven’t you heard about rights of salvage? Not only that, we got possession, and possession is nine tenths of the law!”

  “So…where do we go from here, Buzz?”

  “Bet you expect we have to settle this in court, right?”

  “I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”

  “That would be really lame, don’t you think?”

  “Totally.”

  “We got a much quicker way, and it’ll be fair.”

  “How would it work?”

  “Come on over and find out, you and Quinn both.”

  “Like, when?”

  “Like how about now?”

  Half an hour later we were pedaling up the Carvers’ driveway. What did we have to lose? we figured. Still, I couldn’t help remembering that every other time we’d gone over, for paintball or whatever, we’d come home with the short end of the stick.

  Attila came charging down the driveway, as large and ferocious as a dire wolf from the Pleistocene. He was barking at first, but then he had me spotted. He ran up close and sniffed my hand. Quinn and I got off our bikes and walked them the rest of the way. I was patting Attila’s head and he was wagging his tail as the twins showed up at the corner of the house. They looked pretty baffled about me and their war dog. I was remembering how they’d sat on me in my crazy dream a couple of nights before. These were really big guys.

  “Come and check out our catapult,” Buzz said. Max wasn’t saying anything.

  What about Fred? I wondered as we followed them around the side of the house. Quinn, I could see, was wondering the same thing. Hadn’t they called us to come over and settle about the meteorite?

  Soon as we got out back, their catapult loomed larger than life, no less than twenty feet high, at the near end of the meadow. Quinn was seeing it for the first time and was having trouble believing his eyes. In another strange twist, Cal was sitting on a commode at the foot of the medieval war machine, with his fist to his chin like the famous statue I couldn’t remember the name of.

  Silent Cal got up and wandered off to the side. He hadn’t been doing any business, just sitting on the lid. Five or six other toilets were scattered around, along with a lot of other junk.

  Buzz was busting his buttons. “Introducing Destructo!” he boomed with a sweeping gesture. Max’s pride was more fierce, like he was going to put the hurt on us if we didn’t react properly.

&nbs
p; Quinn gave it up for Destructo. “That’s just insane!” he cried.

  Max nodded with satisfaction. Buzz beamed.

  “Colossal!” I added, but they didn’t make like they’d heard. What else was new? Quinn’s reaction was all that counted. Quinn had always gotten a pass, maybe just for being from Lead. Their teams had a raft of state titles. I was always going to be chopped liver on account of my Custer report back in fourth grade.

  We walked closer yet to their wicked-looking new toy. The monstrosity was constructed mostly out of black steel. It was mounted on wheels, like a Trojan horse. It crossed my mind to wonder if my house was out of range. Buzz asked if I remembered the scale model they’d built for school.

  I laughed. “Are you kidding? You guys nailed the principal with that golf ball.”

  “We forgot to yell ‘Fore!’ Fortunately he was cool about it.”

  “Does it work?”

  “We’ll find out in a few minutes. You guys are pretty special. You get a sneak preview this morning, and we aren’t even going to charge you admission.”

  The twins marched us over to the catapult and invited us to take a seat. We did, on the two closest toilets, and Max sat down on a third. Buzz told us they’d found them at the dump. “We found a lot of throw-ables there, these bowling balls, that cash register, those kitchen sinks, those computers, that old outboard motor…”

  Quinn pointed off to the left. “What’s up with the pile of stones?” More than a few, I noticed, were the same kind of river cobbles missing from my mother’s flower beds.

  “We’re going to hurl thirty or forty at a time. Better hope they don’t shred your house, Brady!”

  Off to the side, Silent Cal was chewing on a piece of grass. He took off his cowboy hat and swiped a grasshopper from his pant leg. We said hi. Cal flicked his eyes at us in vague recognition.

  Max stood up tall and cleared his throat, like he was about to give a speech. At the same time, Buzz sat down. Even Attila wondered what was going on. Max wasn’t known as an orator.

  “Here goes,” Max began with his trademark growl. “Picture you’re back in the 1300s, safe, sound, and filthy rich in your castle. An army of fifty thousand marches up and camps outside your walls. They want to get inside. You know why? They want to tear you limb from limb along with all your relatives and servants. You wonder why they’re chopping down a bunch of your trees. Day by day you watch helplessly as they build a siege catapult like this one, only theirs is made out of wood. How would you feel?”