The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [74]
At that he reached into the side pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out something that looked like a cell phone. He flipped it open and pressed a button. I leaned over his arm to look. It was a miniature computer, with a screen lighting up on one side and a digital keyboard on the other. After a moment the screen filled with tiny symbols streaming along.
“What the heck? How can you read that?”
Jed put something over his eyes that looked like swim goggles with green lenses. He grinned like Boots Odum.
“Yikes! You look like an insect,” said Barbie.
“No, a space alien,” I said. Those lenses fit perfectly over Jed’s eyes. They were the exact same size and shape.
“Cool! Can I see?”
Jed handed me the goggles. Excitedly I pulled the strap around my head, but the lenses only covered the outside corners of my eyes. “I can’t see anything. What the heck?” They were just green. Like a blank chalkboard.
Jed took the goggles back and put them on. “Custom made for my eyes only. Stan invented the technology. Calls it the Little Genius System. Top secret stuff. Don’t tell him I showed you, or he’ll have to kill me.”
He turned his face toward the computer again. The symbols on the keyboard blinked rapidly, as if invisible fingers were typing a hundred words a minute, and then suddenly the text disappeared, replaced by images of landforms—North America, the U.S., and then a big dark triangle shape sunk deep into the rolling hills, with something round blinking in the middle like a dim mood lamp.
“The gore!” I said.
Barbie leaned over me leaning over Jed and grabbed the computer to see. Then she looked out over the actual gore and said, “Amazing.”
There were still a few vehicles emerging from the Onion, heavy equipment mostly, looking like Tonka toys. Jed moved the satellite image over toward town, and we saw a traffic jam of vehicles from Main Street Kokadjo packing the highway toward Exton. All the vehicles were headed that way, even in the breakdown lanes, except for one of ORC’s security Hummers. That was stuck in front of Skate Away trying to get through the opposite way, heading to the edge of town.
A little way past the traffic jam, at the bottom of Kettle Ridge, a huge dump truck from the strip mine had been parked to block the road. After that the pavement made an empty black ribbon until the very top, where one lonely red pickup sat overlooking the gore. Jed zoomed the image in on Stupid. I mean Fluffly Kitty. He had jumped out the window and was now sitting on the hood like a gargoyle.
“Cool!” I said. “Hey, can we look at the commune?” Maybe we’d find some clue about why the Dogstars left Zensylvania in Odum’s hands so suddenly.
“Not now,” he said. “There’s something else I need to check out first.” And he whizzed the image straight over to the Boys of Summer Stadium. Its parking lots were full, but the field and the stands were empty.
“That’s weird,” said Barbie. “Where did all the people go?”
“Where do you think?” said Jed, as if it should be obvious.
“To buy hot dogs?” I said.
“That’s outrageous,” said Barbie.
“Then they must have beamed up into the government’s secret starship.”
Jed laughed and tousled my hair. “I missed you even more than Fluffy Kitty, bro. No, everyone’s gone to the bomb shelters underground.”
“Oh,” me and Barbie both said. Hers was the oh, of course kind and mine was oh, is that all. Sometimes the truth is pretty boring.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why a little podunk town like Kokadjo got a stadium? Sure, people come from all over the county for the games and concerts, but the real reason Stan had the stadium built was to have an emergency evacuation site for ORC. Adrium is too volatile to handle without major precautions. And all his computer servers are backed up at an underground lab there. All his technology, all his research. The walls are so thick, everyone and everything down there could survive any disaster.”
“Then why didn’t we go there like everyone else?” squealed Barbie, punching Jed’s arm.