We Sled With Dragons (6 page)

“OLIVER! CELIA!” THEY
heard their parents voices on the street, whisper-shouting their names.

“Let's go,” sighed Celia, opening the door and gesturing for her brother to go first. “You do the talking,” she added.

“Me?” Oliver stopped in the hallway. “Why me?”

“Because you saw the movie first!”

“But—” Oliver really didn't want to have to explain this to his parents. If they were wrong, they would sound like lunatics, like they'd gone just as crazy as the contestants at the end of
Bizarro Bandits.
If they were right, they would be dragged off to the snowy reaches of the North Pole.

Neither option was appealing.

“If you hadn't turned on
Celebrity Fashion Crimes
I never would have seen all those drawings in the journal.”

“Well, that just shows you that you should pay more attention to fashion.”

Oliver knew he'd never win the argument with his sister.

“Over here!” Celia whisper-shouted back into the street.

“Oh, thank goodness!” Their mother rushed inside the movie theater, hugging the children tightly. “We thought you'd been captured.”

“No,” said Oliver. “We actually found—”

“Why did you wander off?” Sam asked Oliver, as the rest of the rescue party streamed inside. “It is not safe.”

“I know that,” Oliver said. “But we found this thing and we—”

“Come on,” said Dr. Navel. “Corey's already arranged for a private jet to get us out of here!”

“This is a pretty cool old movie theater,” said Corey. “I wonder if they'd want to do a Corey Brandt film festival.”

“You'd want to come back to Djibouti?” Celia was shocked.

Corey giggled at the word Djibouti. Celia rolled her eyes.

“We should go before the police or the pirates or the goat herders find us here,” said Dr. Navel.

“Yeah, but we saw this thing and it means we—” Oliver was still trying to tell everyone what they'd seen.

“Come on,” said Qui, peeking out at the street again. “The coast is clear.”

“We have to find Santa Claus!” Oliver declared.

Everyone turned to stare at him. The hot sun over Djibouti blazed down. Sam closed the door again. A bead of sweat drizzled down Oliver's forehead. “I mean, er, to find Atlantis . . . um, see, uh . . . there's a movie.” He pointed at the screen behind him but it was blank. No light shined from the projection booth. “Well, there was a movie,” said Oliver.

Dr. Navel squinted at Oliver and Celia with a look that said “I wonder if both of my children have toxic parasites?”

“There really was a movie!” Celia said. “We're not crazy.”

“Of course you're not crazy, honey.” Their mother nodded. “But if you saw a movie here, someone must have been showing it, right? Which means we're not alone here.”

All eyes turned to the dark projection booth above the seats. All ears listened carefully for any sounds of movement. Oliver and Celia felt knots tying in their stomachs. Had someone been watching them the whole time?

Their mother ran to the back of the theater and climbed onto the chairs, hoisting herself into the dark booth.

“Be careful!” Dr. Navel warned, long after it would have been helpful advice.

The twins watched the opening in the wall, too nervous to breathe.

“It's okay!” their mother called. “There's no one here.” She climbed out and trotted back down the aisle to her family.

“If there is no one there,” wondered Professor Rasmali-Greenberg, “then who showed the children a film?”

“No one,” said their mother. “There's no film in the projector.”

“Maybe they ran away?” suggested Celia.

“There's no bulb in the projector either,” said their mother. “Nor is there electricity running to it. It could not have been turned on.”

“C-r-e-e-p-y,” Corey spelled.

“So . . . um.” Qui scratched the back of her neck. “Who is Santa Claus?”

“You don't know who Santa is?” Oliver asked. “Old Saint Nick? Like, uh, Father Christmas?”

“Is Santa Claus an ancestor of yours?” Qui wondered. “Do you pray to him?”

Oliver looked to Celia. She crossed her arms. She wasn't going to explain it.

“Uh, I guess, sort of.” Oliver shrugged. He didn't really want to explain about Christmas and stockings and presents and Santa's lists of who'd been naughty and who'd been nice. Somehow, it felt really embarrassing to talk about, even though he knew that everyone had their beliefs and his were no better or worse than anyone else's. They all sounded strange to outsiders.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,”
said their mother. The kids looked at her with puzzled expressions.

“William Shakespeare?” she said. “
Hamlet
? What do you all learn in school these days?”

“We're in sixth grade, Mom,” said Celia. “We don't read
Hamlet.
”

“The point is,” their mother said, “the world has no end of wonders. Think of everything you've seen and done. You've climbed mountains in Tibet. You've explored jungles and oceans, met witches and monsters and villains.”

“And a talking yak,” said Oliver.

“And a talking yak,” agreed his mother. “So you see . . . why shouldn't Santa Claus lead the way to Atlantis?”

“Because he's not real,” said Celia.

“How do you know?” Oliver objected.

“I just do.”

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

“Do not.”

“We must go.” One of the warriors came over to the interrupt them.

“Agreed.” Dr. Navel peered outside again. “Everyone on the streets is looking for us, though. How will we make it to the airfield?”

“I have an idea.” Sam smiled and spoke to his elders in their language. He pointed to the mannequins along the wall. The elders had a brief discussion and then Sam turned to Ernest, the celebrity impersonator. He borrowed a pen from Dr. Navel and approached Ernest, holding the pen like a spear.

“One more show,” said Sam, as Ernest groaned his objections through the gag in his mouth, backing away from the young Dinka warrior, his eyes wide with fear.

“YOU AREN'T LYING
to me, are you?” Bonnie demanded.

The market woman shook her head inside her colorful scarf. Bonnie's knife tapped against the fabric while the other pirates held the woman's arms behind her back.

“Why would they go into a movie theater?” Bonnie asked.

The woman started speaking frantically, but Bonnie didn't understand a word of her language. She spat on the ground at the woman's feet. “It was a rhetorical question,” she said. She nodded at her men and they let the woman go. Bonnie grabbed a mango from one of the woman's baskets and took a bite out of it, skin and all.

“Bleck.” She spat. “This isn't even ripe.” She tossed the mango to the ground in front of the woman, walking away without paying for it. Pirates, as we all know, do not like to pay for anything they can simply steal.

As they walked away the woman muttered oaths under her breath and pulled her cell phone from her robe. She sent a quick text message and looked to the alley by her market stall, where a Dinka warrior received the message. He looked up from his phone and nodded a thank-you to the woman. Then he waved behind him.

The market woman watched as an odd assemblage of foreigners followed the warrior from the alley. Among them were a lizard, a monkey, a chicken, two adults, and two children, all dressed like characters from classic movies; a girl wearing a colorful wool hat despite the desert heat and a teenager who looked a lot like the famous Corey Brandt.

Bonnie and her goons approached the Odeon Cinema. It was easy enough to find, with its large rusted sign. It was the only movie theater in Djibouti. It did seem fitting that the couch potatoes and the celebrity would hide out there. Bonnie studied the posters by the front door advertising that evening's showing. Some mindless action movie. Bonnie did not like action movies. She found the life of a pirate active enough. She enjoyed romantic comedies, although she could never admit that in front of her pirate crew. They'd laugh at her and then they'd try to do to her what she'd done to the previous captain. She did not care to become shark bait just because she enjoyed a big-screen kiss from time to time.

“All right, boys,” she said. “The Navels have escaped too many times. I don't want to take any chances this time. Don't ask questions and don't talk to them. No clever lines. This isn't some movie and we aren't some movie villains. The only one of them who's worth anything is Corey Brandt. Capture him. The rest you can gut like fish for all I care. We leave no other survivors.”

“What about the warriors?” asked one of the pirates, who did not care to go into hand-to-hand combat with a seven-foot-tall champion of desert warfare. He'd gone into piracy because he liked the loot, not because he liked taking a spear to the head.

“And what about the lizard?” asked another, who had seen what Beverly had done to his shipmates.

Bonnie didn't answer. She steadied the grip on her knife and charged the front entrance to the cinema. With a few quick kicks, the doors burst open against their hinges and the pirates streamed through the small lobby and into the open-air auditorium.

“You know that was a pull door?” one of the pirates called as they ran through. “We didn't need to break it.”

“Aha!” Bonnie shouted, ignoring the man. The Navels were sitting low in their seats, watching the blank screen. She recognized the backs of two small heads and she saw Corey Brandt next to them, looking around nervously.

Had she been a more thoughtful woman, Bonnie might have wondered why the famous teenager was wearing a gag, but she was not a thoughtful woman. She was filled with bloodlust and she charged, tackling the teenager to the ground, while her men used their heavy knives to take off the Navels' heads with powerful swipe.

The twins' small heads hit the ground with hollow thumps. Their white-plastic bodies slumped forward onto the dusty floor.

“Mannequins!” Bonnie cried.

The wigs rolled into the dirt.

Bonnie looked down at Corey. Her eyes narrowed. She wiped her thumb under his eye, and once again his teardrop freckle rubbed away.

“Ernest!” she groaned. “We've been tricked!”

“It's worse than that,” said one of her men. “We're trapped!”

Dinka warriors, more than Bonnie could count, appeared atop the wall all around them. Their faces popped up from the projection booth. They rushed in from the side doors and the front doors, their spears poised. The pirates were surrounded. They dropped their weapons and put their hands up.

Well, all but one of them.

“Cowards!” yelled Bonnie. “I am your captain! Fight with me!”

“Pass,” said one the pirates.

“No thanks,” said another.

A third answered in Dutch and a fourth in Chinese, but their meaning was clear enough.

“Well, you'll never take me alive!” Bonnie yelled at the warriors.

Sam, standing beside his elders on the high wall, shrugged.

“If that's what you want!” he called down.

The other pirates took a few steps away from Bonnie.

“We're fine with being taken alive!” one of them called. “We surrender! Take us! Take us alive!”

Bonnie crouched in an attack position.

“Mrrrm!” Ernest groaned as she stepped on his hand, stumbling backward and hitting her head on the ground.

When she woke, she and her men were tied around the old rusty Odeon sign for all the city to see, as the Djibouti police argued about how best to get the pirates down and take them to prison. Ernest was tied up with them, but his gag had finally slipped from his mouth.

“I'm not with them!” he shouted. “I'm innocent! I'm Corey Brandt!”

“Where's your freckle?” one of the police officers demanded and Ernest had no answer to that. He sighed as he saw a small plane take off in the distance, lifting over the city and taking a hard turn over the ocean.

“I thought so,” the officer called. “You are all under arrest for piracy, destruction of property, and disturbing the peace of Djibouti!”

In spite of everything, Ernest cracked a smile.

Djibouti.

It really was a funny name for a city.