The Left Behinds and the iPhone That Saved George Washington (6 page)

“It isn’t?” says Daniel.

Elizabeth yanks on Daniel’s coat and flits her eyebrows up and down. “He is touched,” she says. “He speaks gibberish.”

“I don’t,” I say. “What it means is that this isn’t real. It
could
be real, if we don’t do anything about it. Or it could be
changed
. I’m sure of it. Because if we could be here, that means we could be
anywhere
. Don’t you see?”

“I’m afraid I do not,” says Daniel. “I’m afraid I do not see a thing.”

“You said you were worried about your father being blamed? About the mark your family would have on it for all time? Well, what I’m telling you is that we can do something about it. First off, let’s go get my friends. Then, we’ll change a little history. I think there’s a way to make all of this right.”

Elizabeth shakes her head and grabs hold of Daniel’s coat.

“I’m going back,” I say. “To the farmhouse.” I lift up my pickax. “And I’m taking this. I hope you’ll help.”

“You shall go alone,” Elizabeth says.

“Daniel? Are you sure?”

“Of you, I am not. Of my father being blamed, I am.”

“Then you have a choice. You can either sit here and do nothing, like a potted plant, or you can come with me and do something.”

I turn to go. If the “potted plant” crack works, I’ll have to thank my dad.

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
I’
M
in front of the farmhouse, and I see everyone sitting down at a big table. Like they’re waiting for dinner.

By
everyone
, I mean Bev and Brandon. They’re sitting down. The Hessians, both uniformed and not, are standing up.

And dinner is not being served. iPhones are being served.

Both of them—one white, one black—are lying on the table. Then I notice something: I can’t see any hands. Not a single one. Not Bev’s, not Brandon’s. No hands on the table, no hands scratching an ear or a nose, no hands nowhere.

They must have tied them behind their backs.

I’m outside the farmhouse, my feet in the snow, holding the pickax.

I now pretty much know the score. I know what kind of weapons they have, what kind of weapon I have.

I can do a lot of calculations, a lot of figuring, but I don’t have a plan, exactly, just yet.

I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

Smash a window, throw in a fireball, burn the place down?

Make scary noises to cause half of them to run outside?

Wait until they all go to sleep?

I count off the Hessians: there’s Mr. Butt-Ugly, the dude who speaks English; the other guy dressed in farmer clothes; and a soldier.

Three of them altogether.

Wait a second: weren’t there four of them?

Where’s Soldier Number Two?

A whole bunch of things happen all of a sudden.

I turn, I see him coming up behind me, and I swing my pickax with all I got.

I miss.

I miss him, that is. The farmhouse window? That I don’t miss. I smash through, and while I’m at it I lose hold of the pickax. It flies through the window, glass shards spilling all over the place, and hits the very table where Bev and Brandon are sitting.

Everyone inside is, shall we say,
startled
a little. They
jump out of their boots, is what they do. But I only get to watch their reaction for maybe like a nanosecond, because Soldier Number Two, who I tried to whack with the pickax, doesn’t seem startled at all. In fact, he seems kind of angry, if I had to put a word to it. Plus, he has a musket, with a big, sharp bayonet at its end. And he rears back, like he has every intention of ramming the thing straight through me.

Inside the farmhouse, I hear Brandon say something, and I hear Bev shout something too. I’d love to know more about what’s going on, but there’s this thrusting bayonet, you see, coming at me.

I duck.

I hit the deck.

He misses.

Then he recoils, tries again.

The
deck
, by the way, the so-called
deck
, is nothing but snow. His second swipe lands a micrometer from my neck. I twist, he strikes snow.

Then his legs are pulled out from under him. He falls, falls, falls and his musket goes up, up, up.

More shouts, screams from inside. Something crashing, something banging. English words, German words.

Daniel and Elizabeth run across my field of vision, Daniel holding on to a long length of thick rope.

Now the musket is coming down, down, down. I get to my feet, reach for it, reach for it, get it.

I swing around.

I point it through the smashed window.

I see Mr. Butt-Ugly standing over Brandon, arm raised, a pistol in his hand.

For a second I think I hallucinate.

I think I see something very odd. The pistol in Butt-Ugly’s hand? Is it a German Luger, circa World War II? Which is not possible, as the thing surely hasn’t been invented yet.

But whatever. The advantage is mine. I point the musket through the window. It’s a heavy thing, this musket, and really long—like, about three-quarters as tall as me, practically. I can tell right away I won’t be able to hold the thing straight out for very long—I’m not strong enough. I’m also wondering if it’s loaded, if you just have to pull the trigger, or do you have to cock it first, or what? I ought to be able to do it because I saw a musket-firing demo at the reenactment.

I squeeze the trigger and nothing happens.

Then I cock it. Which means I pull this thingamajig back until it clicks into place.

Then I squeeze it again.

H
AD THE THING BEEN
loaded, it would have fired. Had my aim been true, ol’ Butt-Ugly would have gotten plugged in the head, which might have ended the whole thing there and then.

Might have.

Doesn’t.

Butt-Ugly is really ticked off. He’s holding this pistol, remember, which really
does
appear to be a Luger. He yanks the pickax from the table and flings it back at me.

Fast.

It flies through the window.

I duck, I hit the deck, round two.

The pickax sails above my head, lands in the snow.

Soldier Number Two gets to it before I do. He’s also ticked off about having his legs yanked out from under
him. About losing his musket to a kid. About having to be the guy marching around in the snow while everyone else gets to warm up inside.

So he grabs the pickax, raises it above his head with both arms, and is just about to bring it down. But he forgets one thing. One very important item.

I still have his musket.

He starts to swing the pickax, and I do what anyone in my sneakers would do.

I stick him in the belly with his musket.

Hard.

It’s lucky for him it’s the butt end, not the business end, of the musket.

He goes,
Arrrrrrrr
.

Arrrrrrrr
, like a pirate.

His arms were above his head, his big fat belly was totally exposed, and I hit him as hard as I could.

That’s when he went,
Arrrrrrrr
.

The guy staggers backward.

Bev screams: “Mel!”

Butt-Ugly raises his Luger. Hallucination or not, I’m calling ’em like I see ’em, and I say it
is
a Luger.

He fires.

His Luger, unlike my rifle, is loaded and ready.

It goes:
boom
.

I
DON
’
T DODGE BULLETS
.

In case you’re wondering.

I don’t dodge bullets, I don’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, and, normally speaking, I don’t fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

I’m only twelve years old, for crying out loud. Well, twelve years and three months, if you want to be technical.

So when a guy points a pistol at me and fires, what do you expect me to do about it?

If you guessed not much, you guessed right.

Butt-Ugly fires; I stare. That’s pretty much it. I see a little burst of yellow fire shoot out of his pistol, I hear the
boom
of the shot, but I don’t really do much of anything
else. I don’t feint left, dodge right. I don’t hit the deck. I just stand there, staring, and I don’t even have much time to think things through. To think:
Oh, this must be the last second of my life. What
were
all those things I was going to do?
Or:
I’m so sad. How I’ll miss my dear old dad and mom
. My life—all twelve years and three months of it—does not flash before my very eyes.

I kind of fritz out, if you want to know the truth of it. I
freeze
. My mind goes like totally
blank
.

Boom
.

You hear that, you wait for the next part, where things go bad.

Like, your life is over, in other words.

The end.

But I hear the
boom
, but no bang.

Boom, but no
bang
.

Meaning he missed from ten feet, or there was never a bullet in there in the first place.

Boom, no bang.

It takes me a long, long time—like two, three seconds—to process this.

He shoots, but I’m alive.

Then I see the other guys raise their muskets high. The one dressed as a farmer, and the one dressed as a soldier. Who, if I saw correctly out of the corner of my eye in one of the milliseconds just before Butt-Ugly raised his Luger, had been busy ramming rods down the barrels of their muskets. Which is how they load the things,
remember. My data-processing center, otherwise known as my brain, sends out an alert.

A message.

Danger
, it says.

Danger, danger, danger
.

This time I don’t just stand there, though. This time I hit the deck like a trained Navy Seal and scramble the heck away from the window.

Two shots blast right above my head:
boom
and
boom
.

I hear, at the same time, Daniel and Elizabeth, who are about thirty yards away from the firing line, but off to the side.

They’re screaming. At the proverbial tops of their lungs. They’re screaming
at
me. Or rather
to
me.

“Come!” they scream. “We have to get away!”

I’m so happy to hear the word
we
. It’s nice, at a time like this, to feel included in things.

T
HEN
I
HEAR
B
EV
screaming too. From inside the farmhouse.

And you know what? I can’t remember the last time two girls were screaming to me at the same time. Okay, I remember: like, never.

Bev screams: “Mel! Mel! Get away!” And her scream is cut off, like someone puts a hand over her mouth.

I’m scrambling away at this point, don’t forget. Like a trained Navy Seal, or maybe like just an ordinary seal, the kind that has flippers instead of arms and legs. I’m scrambling through snow, my arms and hands and fingers and feet and toes are nearly frozen solid, but I’m making progress. I’m getting closer and closer to Daniel and Elizabeth, and if there’s one main thing I’m thinking, it’s this:
man, I’m glad these guys don’t have automatic weapons
. This whole gunpowder–ramrod musket thing is really helping me out, because it gives me a few extra precious seconds.

I get to Daniel and Elizabeth, who are hiding behind some kind of little stone thing. A well, I’m guessing.

Two more volleys fly above our heads.

Daniel grabs my arm: “We have to get out of here. They’re armed, we’re not. It’s hopeless if we stay and fight.”

“What about my friends?” I say.

“You can’t help them,” Elizabeth says. “They told you so themselves.”

When was it—all of ten, fifteen minutes ago—when we were in the horse stable and just about ready to kill each other? Things can change in a hurry if the muskets start going. “What made you come?” I say.

“If there’s any chance,” says Elizabeth. “Any chance at all … that our father will not be remembered … that General Washington will not be … we decided it was better …”

“To try,” says Daniel. “Instead of try not. Now, we must go. Follow us. We know where to hide, so they’ll never find us.”

We move out. Zigging and zagging. About seven minutes later we’re on another small hill, and we glance back: no soldiers. They’ve decided to stay put. A Bev and a Brandon and two iPhones, it appears, are more important than us.

I have to take a break. I’m panting, I’m huffing, I’m puffing, I’m sweating like a pig, and I’m frozen to the bone.

I sit down in the snow and take out my iPhone. And you know what? At this point I don’t really care what Daniel and Elizabeth think about it. They stare and frown, but they need to take a break as much as I do, so they sit.

One new text has come in.

From Mr. Hart, of course. He says:
What is your power situation? You need to have at least 50%
.

Really, Mr. Hart? And how is that going to help Bev and Brandon?

Why is that?
I tap in.

It won’t work with less than 50% power
.

What exactly won’t work?

Do you want to come back or don’t you?

Of course. But we have a problem
.

What?

Bev and Brandon have been kind of captured
.

Hessians?

Yes
.

Armed?

Yes
.

You?

No
.

There’s a pause. I take advantage:
Plus can’t get more power—no electricity here
.

No response. I’m down to five percent power, but I’m beginning to think it doesn’t matter, especially if there’s nothing to be done about it. Also, why fifty percent? What does Mr. Hart know, anyway? And what isn’t he saying? I tap in:
Mr. Hart, what’s going on? Why are we HERE?

It’s a while before I hear the three-chord mini melody. I read:
How much power now?

5 percent
, I answer back. And notice he didn’t answer my question.