Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga)
Read Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) Online
Authors: Adam Rex
Tags: #Speculative Fiction, #Ages 11+
For Dr. Marie Rex, who is a teacher today
CONTENTS
Samantha Doe was going to miss her big red coat. It was by far the warmest thing she’d ever worn, and she’d worn it every day for more than three months, and you couldn’t help getting attached to something like that. On the inside it was furry, like a pet. It even had the word
DOE
on the pocket. Samantha loved her big pet coat. But she was going to have to give it back.
She’d been in Antarctica for fifteen weeks—twice as long as she’d been told. She could swear near the end that Goodco was just grasping at excuses to keep her there. And then there was that business with her laptop.
One of the Goodco people, one of the big men who didn’t seem to have any scientific credentials at all, had come to her dorm room and asked why she hadn’t been sending any personal emails to her children.
Samantha had, in fact. She’d sent Scott and Polly each an email every day since the Saturday after Thanksgiving. A hundred letters. But she said, “Well … since it’s
personal
emails I’m not sending, I don’t see how it’s your—”
The man brushed past her and grabbed her laptop off the bed.
“Hey!” Samantha said. But she stepped back. She was suddenly afraid of this big man. He’d just come in from the cold night, wearing the same sort of coat Samantha wore, that everyone wore. Red on the outside, furry on the inside. On him it looked like an animal he’d turned inside out and was flaunting, like a warning. He scowled at the screen.
“You haven’t sent an email to your kids since December first,” he said. “And they’ve never emailed you back?”
Samantha wanted to fold up into herself. Scott and Polly wrote her all the time—what was this guy talking about?
“Here—” the big man, this massive man, told her. “This. Where did you get this software?” He showed her the screen, and a file she’d never seen before. It was called
2003 TAXES
, and it was nested inside three folders named for sugar-free candy recipes and a fourth titled
PHOTOS OF MY UNATTRACTIVE AUNT
. She’d never noticed any of these before, either. Her laptop had a lot of garbage on it.
“Why … why does it matter?” Samantha asked the man, who was heaving, who could not possibly be getting larger, could he?
“It matters … it
matters
because it’s counteracting the spyware
we
put on your computer. How did it get here?”
Samantha didn’t know, though her mind turned back to a drawing Polly had sent, months ago, that took a suspiciously long time to download. Anyway, the big man dropped her laptop carelessly on the bed and thundered out before she could answer, or get indignant, or even ask what he’d meant by
spyware
.
She stood awhile, aware of the shallow tide of her own breath. She wasn’t so sure about this Goodco anymore. She didn’t care how beloved their cereals were.
Afterward she checked, and it was true: all the old emails to and from her kids had vanished off her computer, as if they’d deleted themselves. All of Scott’s curious messages, wanting to know every last thing about the strange phenomenon she was studying. Even Polly’s drawing of a cat with a unicorn’s horn, gone. She sat on her bed and thought for a long time.
The next day she demanded to leave on the next plane out, and over the following weeks Goodco delivered one feeble excuse after another why she needed to stay. But then finally, when they gave their permission, an unscheduled flight made ready to leave right away—a woman at the Kiwi base had slipped in the shower, and Samantha could hitch a ride on her medical transport. She landed in New Zealand, and gave back her red coat, and caught a plane to Los Angeles, and then another to Philadelphia. Scott and Polly and their father, John, would be meeting her at the airport—or so they said in an email she could no longer find five minutes after she read it.
She deplaned into the terminal, exited the secure area, and almost didn’t see the chauffeur holding a sign with her name on it. She wasn’t looking for her name, after all; she was looking for her family. But she approached the uniformed man with a little frown on her face.
“I’m Samantha Doe,” she told him. “I wasn’t expecting a driver.”
The chauffeur tucked the sign under his arm and fished something shiny out of his pocket.
“I’ve been instructed to give you this,” he said, and handed her a small gold octagonal hoop.
She turned it in her hand. “What is it? It … heh … it looks like a miniature particle collider.”
“Put it on.”
“What?”
“I’ve been instructed to tell you to put it on.”
“Instructed by whom? My ex-husband?” she said as she slipped the thing onto her wrist. Then, wincing, she asked, “Was it always glowing?”
And then she was gone.
Thirty feet away, Scott gasped. He couldn’t help it. There was no flash of light, no puff of smoke. His mother was just there, and then she wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere. She wasn’t anywhere in the whole universe.
“GO GO GO GO!” shouted someone in the crowd, and then ten ordinary-looking men converged on the startled chauffeur and seized his arms—Freemen, laying in wait for Scott and his friends to show themselves. Members of the Good and Harmless Freemen of America, a secret society of creeps who did Goodco’s bidding. Scott’s heart started pounding against his chest like it wanted out—and why not? The last time he’d seen so many Freemen in one place, they’d tried to dissect his friends.
“What the—” sputtered the chauffeur as the Freemen held him fast. “Lemme go! What happened to that lady?”
The surrounding men, in their plain clothes and scarves, looked to an older Freeman in a black cowboy hat and duster, who stood apart and scanned the faces in the crowd. Then he turned to the driver.
“Who hired you?” Scott heard him growl.
“Some old guy,” said the chauffeur in a high voice. “Look, what’s this about?”
“It’s the wizard’s work,” the man in black told the others. “Must be. Fan out, he might be close.”
The man in black was both right and wrong—the wizard was close, but the wizard wasn’t a wizard.
Scott started to move, but Merle laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Stay put,” the old man said.
Scott’s wig felt itchy. His fake glasses felt fake. In his black wig and big black glasses, he felt like Clark Kent. A kind of bizarro universe Clark Kent who removes his glasses and for some reason his hair to reveal that he is actually a perfectly ordinary blond boy with a mild peanut allergy.
Well, not so ordinary, really. He was part fairy, on his father’s side. Plus he had a leprechaun in his backpack.
“Is he really Merlin?” another Freeman asked the man in black. “They say he turns people into animals.”
“I
wish
,” huffed Mick, the leprechaun. Merle could only do a few cool things, and he was already doing most of them.