Mission Unstoppable (9 page)

Chapter 14
The Singing Sand

T
he twins woke up the next morning—June 20—to hear their father ranting to nobody in particular.

“A ticket?” Dr. McDonald bellowed. “I can’t believe the cops gave me a parking ticket. In a campground! That’s un-American!”

Coke buried his face in his pillow and tried to go back to sleep.

When Dr. McDonald went outside and peeled the “ticket” off the windshield, he realized it wasn’t a ticket at all. No ticket would say

JNTET FFHNO LCDNB LTYUL

VSEED NTHTU EWNYI TOECO

KOTEA EORIEDPNOITOR

“What do you make of this, Bridge?” he asked.

“It’s not a ticket,” Mrs. McDonald replied. “Maybe it’s a new kind of sudoku puzzle or some word game. It looks like some sort of a code.”

With the word
code
, Pep and Coke bolted up from their bunks. If somebody left a message with a secret code on the windshield, it was meant for
them
, not for their parents.

Coke ran outside in his pajamas and bare feet to snatch the piece of paper out of his father’s hand. He glanced at it for a few seconds—long enough to commit it to memory. Then he ripped up the paper and threw the pieces in the garbage can at the side of their campsite.

“It’s probably just some kids pulling a prank,” he said. “So, what’s for breakfast? And what fabulous place are we going to visit today? Maybe a museum devoted to Mr. Potato Head?”

“Oh, you’ll see,” his mother replied. “All I can tell you is this—it has something to do with singing.”

While the others got dressed and brushed their teeth over the little sink, Coke carefully rewrote the message from the windshield on a sheet of paper. Even people who have photographic memories know that photos fade in time.

“Somebody left us another cipher,” he confirmed to his sister while their parents prepared breakfast. “If it’s anything like the last one, you should be able to solve it.”

Pep looked at the letters and then wrote them down in reverse order on her pad, the same way she did with the first cipher. Only this time the message didn’t make any sense. It didn’t look anything like English.

“What’s wrong?” Coke asked his sister after she had been staring at the pad for five minutes.

“Nothing,” she replied. “It’s just a different kind of cipher. Give me a little time. I’ll crack it.”

When everyone had eaten and the dishes were washed, Dr. McDonald started the RV and jumped back onto I-80 heading east. In about an hour they crossed the state line.

“Did you guys know that the word
nevada
means ‘snowcapped’ in Spanish?” Coke announced.

“Very impressive!” Mrs. McDonald said.

“Thank you, Mr. Show-off,” said Pep.

Less than ten miles from the California border is the big city of Reno. The flashing lights of the casinos were beckoning, but Dr. McDonald barely glanced at them.

“Hey, gambling is legal here, Dad,” Coke hollered from the backseat. “We should hit the slots. Play some blackjack.”

“You’re too young to gamble,” Dr. McDonald hollered back, “and I’m too smart.”

Coke shared a smile with his sister. They had been attacked by guys in golf carts with blow guns, jumped off a cliff, been locked in a burning school, and had their heads stapled, but putting coins in a slot machine was considered too dangerous for kids. Go figure.

As the buildings of Reno disappeared behind them, Pep worked feverishly on the cipher. She jumbled the letters on her pad every which way, trying to make sense of them. She grew increasingly frustrated.

The family continued east on I-80; and shortly after passing Wadsworth, Nevada, the road split. Mrs. McDonald instructed her husband to take the Reno Highway, which is also called Route 50 East. It wasn’t long before they reached the town of Fallon and a sign . . .

They had driven another twenty-five miles east when Mrs. McDonald suddenly shouted, “There it is!”

In the distance, nestled between two mountain ranges, out in the middle of nowhere, was a gigantic mountain of sand.

A beach at the edge of the ocean is no big deal. But a beach in the middle of Nevada was just plain strange.

To make things even stranger, as the McDonalds got closer, they could hear the sand
singing
.

Sand Mountain Recreation Area is famous out West because it gives off an odd, otherworldly moaning sound, like the soundtrack to a horror movie. Dr. McDonald pulled onto a dirt road that brought them to the edge of the dune. Theirs was the only vehicle in the parking lot.

Even the kids, who liked to pretend that nothing impressed them, climbed out of the RV to listen to the sand. A sign stuck in the ground read
Take only photos. Leave only footprints.

The dune is two miles long and six hundred feet high. There was no sign of a human being for miles around, but the sand was talking, singing, moaning. Pep felt goose pimples on her arms. This was a noise she had never heard before.

“It sounds like somebody who’s wounded,” Dr. McDonald observed, “but not quite dead yet.”

“It’s because of the size of the grains of sand and the way the grains bump into each other,” said Coke, who had once read an article on the topic in a science magazine while he was getting his hair cut.

Coke told the others that in order to “sing,” the grains of sand have to be very dry, round, and polished; and they have to
move
, either because of the wind or some geological force. There are twenty-seven areas in the world where there are singing sand dunes, and only four of them are in the United States.

“I don’t like that sound,” Pep said quietly. “It’s creepy.”

“I think it’s marvelous!” Mrs. McDonald gushed, reaching for her laptop. “I’m going to tell my readers all about it!”

“In that case, I’ll be taking a snooze,” Dr. McDonald said as he climbed into the RV and reclined the driver’s seat back as far as it would go.

“Hey, you wanna hike up there?” Coke asked his sister. “I wonder what it sounds like at the top.”

“No thanks,” Pep replied.

“Come on, you afraid?”

“No, I’m not
afraid
,” Pep insisted. “I just don’t want to.”

Coke proceeded to make chicken noises, which prompted Pep to start sprinting up the sand dune ahead of him.

“Last one to the summit is a rotten egg!” she yelled.

“You kids have fun,” Dr. McDonald yelled after them. “The old fogies will stay in the RV and listen to the sand singing from the parking lot.”

“Here,” Mrs. McDonald said as she flipped a little glass jar to Coke, “fill this with sand from the summit. There’s no gift shop here. You gotta bring home a souvenir.”

He stuck the jar in his pocket and chased Pep up the steep slope of Sand Mountain.

As the twins climbed, they could hear the pitch of the “music” change and feel the vibrations in their bones. It was an eerie feeling. Coke looked up in the sky for a plane. It was hard to believe that the sound he was hearing was made by the sand alone.

It was still morning, but the surface was already hot. They could feel the sand through their sneakers.

“We should have brought a water bottle,” Pep said when they were halfway to the top, “and the Frisbee. This would be a good place to throw it.”

“I don’t want to chase your wild throws all over this mountain,” Coke replied.

The sand was soft, and their feet sank into it with each step. They turned to wave at their parents down in the parking lot, but the RV was already a dot on the horizon. They were so far away.

“I know this is gonna sound crazy,” Pep suddenly said, panting as she climbed, “but I have the feeling that somebody is following us.”

“Oh,
please
,” Coke replied. “Will you relax? How could somebody follow us? There’s nobody around for miles. See? The parking lot is empty. Nobody’s here but us.”

As they neared the top of the mountain, Coke took out the jar his mother had given him. Pep got down on her hands and knees to help him fill it with sand.

Coke had just screwed on the top and stuck the jar in his pocket when he heard a voice. It wasn’t the voice of the sand.

“Don’t stand up,” a man ordered.

The twins turned around quickly to look. There was a man standing about ten feet behind them. He was wearing a black suit and a black bowler hat. In his hand was a long, shiny sword. The sun reflected off of it.

“Who are
you
?” Pep asked, shielding her eyes from the glare. “How did you get up here?”

“Who I am or how I got up here is not important, sweetheart,” the man told her.

“I know who you are!” said Coke, who recognized the man right away. “You’re one of the guys in the golf carts! The dudes with the bowler hats and the blow guns.”

“Very good,” bowler dude said. “That was clever the way you two jumped off that cliff to get away from us the other day. It took me by surprise. But it won’t happen again.”

“What are you doing here?” Pep asked, squeezing her brother’s hand tightly.

“I thought you were supposed to be so smart, sweetheart,” the bowler dude said, holding up his sword. “It’s obvious what I’m doing here. I’m going to kill you. You know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But I won’t make the same mistake
this
time. No cliffs.”

“You’re going to kill us with a
sword
?” Coke asked.

“Of course not!” the bowler dude replied. “That would be . . . uncivilized. Come with me.”

“What did we do?” Pep asked, tears in her eyes. “We didn’t hurt anybody. We’re just—”

“Shut up, sweetheart.”

Holding the sword over their heads, the bowler dude marched the twins up to the very top of Sand Mountain and then a few yards farther, where there was a pit that had been dug into the dune on the other side. It was seven feet deep and about the size of a pool table.

“You’ll die from dehydration,” the bowler dude informed them. “It’s far more humane.”

“I’m not getting into that pit,” Pep said defiantly.

“Me nei—”

The bowler dude held his sword sideways in front of him and used the flat side to shove both of them backward. They lost their balance and tumbled into the pit.

“Owwww!”
Coke said, landing hard on his side. Pep popped up right away. She got on her tiptoes and jumped, half expecting Mya and Bones to suddenly show up and save them again. But the pit was too deep to see out of, and there was nobody else around, anyway.

“Your friends aren’t here to help you
this
time, sweetheart,” the bowler dude told her. “My good friend Mrs. Higgins has taken care of them. They won’t be saving your lives anymore.”

“Help!” Pep screamed. “Mom! Dad! Help!”

“Save your energy, sweetheart. They can’t hear you,” the bowler dude told her. “The singing sand is drowning out your voice. That’s why I chose this as the perfect spot to kill you.”