Mission Unstoppable (6 page)

He punched his pillow and flipped it over. That’s when he discovered an envelope tucked neatly underneath the pillow. He picked up the flashlight that was always under his bed and tore open the envelope. There was a note inside.

This is what it said:

KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT

NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI

Chapter 11
On the Road

W
ake up!” Dr. McDonald shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives!”

Coke rolled over for one more minute of precious sleep. In the back of his mind, he vaguely remembered the envelope he’d found under his pillow the night before. He had memorized the message that was inside it: KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI.

But just because you’re classified a genius with a photographic memory doesn’t mean you’re good at figuring out secret messages and codes. Coke considered himself a numbers guy, an action guy.
Ace Fist.
Before he’d fallen asleep, he had slipped the envelope into his backpack so he could show it to his sister in the morning. She would be able to decipher it. She was good at that kind of stuff.

“Who’s ready to go coast to coast?” hollered Dr. McDonald as he bounded into the twins’ room clapping his hands enthusiastically. “It’s our manifest destiny!”

“Not mine,” Coke groaned.

His dad opened the shades to let in some light and to try to wake up the kids. Then he went outside and finished packing the RV, carefully going through his checklist to make sure he didn’t forget anything essential: extra water, flashlights, jumper cables, road flares, first aid kit, pens and paper, trash bags, camera, and so on. Mrs. McDonald busied herself with food, filling the little RV refrigerator and emptying the one at home. A carton of milk left in a fridge for two months would not be a pretty sight when they got back.

Coke threw his iPod, cell phone charger, and a few books into his backpack. He was ready to go. Pep was a different story. In the last few months, she had started to care—for the first time—about her personal appearance. Suddenly, she was spending hours straightening her hair in the mirror and agonizing over what she should wear. Coke teased his sister as she smeared a mysterious substance she called “foundation” on her face to cover up a few pimples that nobody would ever notice in a million years. Some days she even put on nail polish or lip gloss.

“You’re still ugly,” Coke remarked as his sister examined herself. “It’s genetic.” He liked teasing her about her looks, as they looked almost exactly alike.

“Let’s
go
!” Dr. McDonald shouted urgently. “The open road awaits us! We’ve got to get through California today!”

Pep stuffed her hair-straightening iron into her backpack. As an afterthought, Coke grabbed the Frisbee and deck of cards that Bones had given them. There would be time to kill on the road. Even if his sister couldn’t throw a Frisbee, he might meet somebody who could.

Mrs. McDonald had prepared bagels for the kids to eat on the road. She didn’t want to wait another half hour for them to eat a proper breakfast at home.

Finally, everyone piled into the RV, grown-ups in the front seats, kids in the back.

“Take a deep breath, everybody,” Dr. McDonald said, closing his eyes. “Can you smell it? Can you taste it?”

“Taste what, Dad?” Coke asked.

“Fresh air,” his father replied. “If we were taking this trip by plane, we’d be breathing stale, recycled air.”

“We’d also be in Washington a few hours from now,” Coke said.

“I thought recycling was a good thing, Dad,” Pep commented.

“Not recycled
air
,” her father replied. “You kids need to get back to nature. It used to be that children would explore, learn, and become part of their world. But now they just snap digital pictures of each other, Facebook their friends, text, and Twitter. You need to slow down, enjoy the moment. You’re too impatient to get to the next thing.”

“Yeah, can we go now, Dad?” Coke asked. “This is boring.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Dr. McDonald said. “Very few kids get to see this great country the way people used to: on the open road. It’s soul lifting. You’re going to see what makes America’s heart beat. My family took a cross-country trip when I was a kid. Boy, those were some of the best memories of my life.”

“What happened?” Pep asked.

“Uh . . . I . . . don’t remember, actually,” Dr. McDonald admitted. “It was a long time ago.”

“It must have made a huge impression on you, Dad,” Coke remarked.

“Well, it was a great trip,” his father insisted. “I remember that much.”

“Can we
go
already?” Mrs. McDonald said impatiently. “The sooner we leave, the sooner we get to Kansas.”

“And
why
exactly are we going to Kansas?” Pep asked.

“To see the largest ball of twine in the world!” Mrs. McDonald exclaimed. “Remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Coke muttered.

Dr. McDonald rolled his eyes and turned the key. The RV rumbled to life. It didn’t sound like a regular car. The whole thing vibrated.

“Front and back doors locked?” he asked Mrs. McDonald, the copilot.

“Check,” Mrs. McDonald replied.

“Lights out?”

“Check.”

“You called the post office to hold our mail?”

“Check.”

“You stopped the newspaper delivery?”

“Check.”

“Told the neighbors we would be away until the end of the summer?”

“Check.”

“Then we’re off!”

Dr. McDonald shifted into reverse and carefully backed the RV out of the driveway, taking one last look at the house before heading down the street.

In the backseats, the twins breathed involuntary sighs of relief. They were safe, at least for a few months. There would be no more lunatics in golf carts and bowler hats shooting poisoned darts at them. No more schools set on fire. No more buildings exploding. They could put all those attempts on their lives behind them. Maybe the whole thing had just been an elaborate hoax. Maybe they were being punked.

“Are we there yet?” Coke asked when they pulled up to the first stop sign. His father turned around to shoot him a look, and Coke added, “Just kidding, Dad!”

Okay, you need to do something before we continue with the story. Get out a road atlas of the United States. You know, one of those big Rand McNally books. Your mom or dad has one. Everybody has one. Go ahead and ask if you can borrow it. We’ll wait.

Did you get it? Good.

Open it up to a page that shows the entire country. If you wanted to drive all the way across the United States from the Pacific to the Atlantic, there are several different ways you could go. Route 2 goes north across the top of the country from Seattle all the way to Maine. See it?

Route 20 starts at the Oregon coast and wends its way past Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, and Niagara Falls, and ends at Boston, Massachusetts.

Another way to go would be to take Route 50, which is called the Loneliest Road. It starts in Oakland, California, and goes through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia, and finally ends in Ocean City, Maryland.

There’s also the legendary Route 66, but that only goes as far as Chicago.

Do you see them on the map?

After discussing all these options, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald had chosen I-80, a superhighway that starts near San Francisco and ends in Teaneck, New Jersey. This historic route is almost 3,000 miles from one end to the other (2,899.54, to be exact). It follows part of the path of the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the First Transcontinental Railroad.

As they merged onto Route 1 heading south toward San Francisco, Mrs. McDonald put on one of her classic rock CDs from her youth. Some long-haired band called Steppenwolf was singing “Born to Be Wild.
”
In the backseat, the kids groaned. You don’t play “Born to Be Wild” in an RV. It’s just not right. This was going to be a
long
drive.

“Hey, you wanna play cards or something?” Coke asked his sister. He pulled out the deck of cards Bones had given them as a going-away present.

“I don’t know any card games,” Pep replied.

“I’ll teach you one,” Coke said. “Did you ever hear of a card game called 52 Pickup?”

“No.”

“It’s the easiest game in the world.”

Coke took the entire deck of cards in one hand and squeezed it between his thumb and his first finger until the deck bent into an arch shape. Then he squeezed the deck a little more until the cards went shooting up in the air, one at a time. There was a wild spray of playing cards all over the back of the RV.

“And that’s how you play 52 Pickup!” Coke said, cackling his insane laugh.

“You are
so
obnoxious!” Pep told her brother.

“Hey, knock it off back there!” Mrs. McDonald shouted. “Pick up those cards. This isn’t your bedroom. We
all
have to live in here.”

Coke scooped up the cards and shuffled them mindlessly. Staring out the window as they crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, he suddenly remembered the envelope he’d found under his pillow the night before. He pulled it out of his backpack and handed it to his sister without explanation.

“Is this another one of your dumb games?” she asked, hesitating before accepting the envelope.

“It was under my pillow when we went to sleep last night,” he whispered in her ear so their parents wouldn’t hear.

Pep opened the envelope and looked at the message on the slip of paper inside:

KCAORE HTANAO EASUO HEAHT NIAUO AYTEA EMLLIAWI.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Ya got me,” Coke replied.

“It’s some kind of a cipher,” Pep whispered.

“You mean a code?” Coke asked.

“A code disguises words or phrases,” Pep explained. “A cipher disguises single letters.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

“Everybody knows that.”

“I didn’t,” Coke said.

“Well, you’re a dope.”

“What are you kids whispering about back there?” Mrs. McDonald asked.

“Nothing,” the twins replied together.

“How about we play the license plate game?” Dr. McDonald piped up. “Look! That car that just passed us on the left is from Florida!”

“Not right now, Dad,” Pep said. She pulled out her cell phone so she and Coke could text each other without their parents listening in.