Red lights flashed and a loud warning siren blared. Heathcliff raced from table to table. He needed the cure for his parents so that they would remember him, but it was like searching for a four-leaf clover—only the clover patch was going to explode in two minutes.
Flinch appeared, desperately trying to close a suitcase overflowing with candy. “C’mon, we need to get out of here.”
“I have to find the potion,” Heathcliff shouted.
Matilda joined them, dragging her favorite combat dummy behind her.
“You two need to get to the control room,” she yelled.
“I can’t go until I find it!”
The principal and Ruby zoomed into the Playground together.
“Let’s go,” the principal said. “I won’t let them ruin what we’ve built here. You kids are too valuable to the world.”
Heathcliff continued to search frantically. “Who was working on the potion?”
“Son, get in the control room now,” the principal said.
“I won’t go!” Heathcliff cried.
There was a sound like a giant redwood tree splintering and crashing to the forest floor and a thick gray liquid began to fill the room.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Concrete,” the principal said. “We’re burying it alive. If anyone ever stumbles upon this facility, it will be completely useless to them. Heathcliff, I’m only going to say this one more time.”
Didn’t they understand? He needed that potion. “Go on without me.”
“Matilda, does that inhaler of yours have a tranquilizer in it?”
Matilda nodded and aimed her inhaler at Heathcliff.
“Don’t do this!” he begged.
“Sorry,” she said.
There was a loud pop and a sting on the side of his neck, and all the fight in him melted away.
Flinch hefted Heathcliff onto his back and all of the NERDS raced to the control room.
The principal pushed a button and the floor began to rise, though Heathcliff couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the tranquilizer that was making him feel floaty. He watched as the secret headquarters for the National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society vanished below him. There were several loud explosions, and then the lights went out.
“So we’re homeless?” Duncan asked.
“What about the elementary school?” Ruby asked. “Can’t we go back to that one?”
The principal shook his head. “Directive 86 shuts down the middle school, the elementary school, and the high school all at the same time.”
“So that’s it? That’s the end?” Matilda said.
“No, it’s not the end,” the principal replied. “We’re just moving to the backup facility.”
“What backup facility?” Flinch said.
That was the last thing Heathcliff heard before he lost consciousness.
TOP SECRET DOSSIER
CODE NAME: SICKBED
REAL NAME: MARVIN TAYLOR
YEARS ACTIVE: 1981–83
CURRENT OCCUPATION: PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL TEST SUBJECT
HISTORY: MARVIN SPENT MOST OF
HIS YOUNG LIFE IN BED, SICK WITH
A COLD, FEVER, FLU, SORE THROAT,
MIGRAINE HEADACHE, OR CHICKEN
POX. IF ANYONE WAS SICK WITHIN
A FIFTY-MILE RADIUS, IT WAS
ALMOST GUARANTEED THAT AGENT
SICKBED WOULD CATCH IT. HE WAS
THE ONLY AGENT IN NERDS HISTORY
WHO ASKED TO BE PAID IN KLEENEX.
HE WAS ALSO THE ONLY AGENT
OFFICIALLY EXEMPT FROM
FILING REPORTS; THE TEAM’S
DIRECTOR SAID HE COULDN’T
READ WHAT MARVIN WROTE DUE
TO THE SNOT AND BOOGERS ON EVERY PAGE.
UPGRADE: SICKBED COULD GIVE
AN ENEMY GERMS AND VIRUSES AT
WILL, CAUSING THEM TO FALL ILL
WITHIN SECONDS, ALL FROM
A SINGLE COUGH.
Tessa’s father had been arrested and it was her fault. Unlike that morning, when her anger at him was something bitter in her mouth she wanted to spit onto the floor, she felt nothing but despair. She’d gone too far. She just wanted him to lose the election, not wind up in prison. What if he went to jail for the rest of his life? How would she live with herself?
“So are you going to step aside or not?” Funk demanded.
“Huh?” Tessa said, startled by his anger.
The rest of the BULLIES surrounded her.
“You’re not smart enough or tough enough to lead this team!” Snot Rocket shouted. “Plus, your upgrade is L-A-M-E. If anyone should be running this group, it’s me. I have the most experience. I’ve spent the last three years in in-school suspension. I’ve been in twenty fistfights this month, and eighty percent were with teachers.”
“Unfortunately, you didn’t win any of them,” Funk snarled, then turned his rage on Tessa. “I should be in charge. I’m the coolest one under pressure. When that kid was pouring that sticky gunk on me, I didn’t even flinch.”
“Which is why you’re still completely trapped in it,” Loudmouth cried. “A leader has to command respect, and no one can command like me. I don’t want to lead this team, but to be honest, I don’t see any other solution.”
Thor grunted. No one could understand a word he said, but Tessa knew what he meant. He wanted to be in charge, too.
Normally, Tessa would have bristled at a challenge to her dominance. At Sugarland, no one would have dared to get in her face, but after the day’s events she didn’t care anymore. Any one of them could be the leader of this stupid team. “Fine. I quit.”
“Tessa!” Miss Information called when she entered the room. She had her straw boyfriend in her arms and madness in her eyes, and she was waving her finger back and forth in a don’t even think about it gesture.
Tessa had a sudden vision of her future, and it involved tigers with overstuffed bellies licking their greasy chops. At that moment she would’ve been happy to have bugs splattering on her face if it meant she could fly away and escape.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Miss Information continued.
Tessa shook her head. “This isn’t what I signed up for. I didn’t think my dad would be arrested.”
“Really? You pretended to be him and then trashed the home of the most powerful person on the planet. What did you think was going to happen?”
“I just wanted him to lose the election so he would have more time for me.”
“Tessa, that’s what will happen! When you go see him during the prison’s visiting hours, you’ll have his undivided attention. It will be through a Plexiglass window—but he will be all yours.”
“I’m going to turn myself in to the police. I can’t let him be imprisoned for something I did.”
“Oh, honey, you know I can’t let you do that,” her boss said with more than a hint of menace. “You kids are so spoiled these days. I just don’t know what will make you happy. I suppose I have to fix your problem again.”
“Fix it? How? Do you mean break him out of jail?”
Miss Information sighed. “We could, but then you and your family would live like fugitives, sleeping in abandoned buildings and eating rats and discarded banana peels. I’m sure you’d give me the boo-boo face for that, too.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“We have to make it so that today never happened at all.”
As Tessa searched the room for exits, a copper-skinned woman with eyeglasses and a white lab coat stepped into the command center. She looked exhausted, hungry, and in desperate need of a shower. She trembled when Miss Information turned to her.
“Ma’am, I have some very good news,” she said, her voice squeaking. “We cracked the problem with your latest design. We’re testing it as we speak.”
“See! I told you if you just followed my drawings it would be easy to build,” Miss Information said proudly.
“Ma’am, you drew a picture
of an old DeLorean sports car with the words Time Machine at the bottom,” the scientist said.
Miss Information turned to her scarecrow boyfriend. “Isn’t this just grand, darling! It’s the final piece of my master plan. Oh, yes, you’re right. There is a lot of work to do, and not a minute to spare. Well, actually, now that we have a time machine, we have all the minutes we want. But I’m eager to get started.”
She gave the scarecrow a passionate kiss on his painted mouth.
The BULLIES pretended not to notice.
“Where’s my Benjy?” she asked.
The little silver orb floated into the room. “I am here.”
“Benjy, have you studied the footage of our attack on the White House?”
“I have.”
“So you noticed the five children who gave the BULLIES a resounding kick in the pants?”
“I did. I saw the pants-kicking.”
“I want you to find as much information as you can about them and their families, going back several generations.”
“I will start at once,” Benjy said, and zipped out of the room.
“Oh, this is going to be so much fun. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
“Think of what?” Funk asked.
“Erasing my enemies. I have a feeling it will cure those pesky headaches, too.”
“Can you please tell me what is going on?” Tessa asked.
Miss Information squeezed her arm so tight it hurt. “Tessa, you and the rest of the BULLIES are going to accompany Benjy, Alex, and me into the past, where we will locate the ancestors of the kids who attacked you today. Then we will make sure that our mutual enemies were never born. The world will be mine, and there will be a nice side effect for you—today will have never happened. Without the NERDS, there would be no reason for me to have recruited you, given you superpowers, and taken you to the White House to ruin your dad’s life. All the trouble will vanish in an instant. Plus, since I will be running everything when we get back, your dad will be out of a job. You’ll get everything I promised you, Tessa. Everything! Are you in?”
Miss Information was crazy. But Tessa had just seen impossible things: kids who could fly, snot that exploded, stink that could level a house, and her own malleable face. When Miss Information said she could go back in time, Tessa believed it. Her plan might be the only thing Tessa could do to save her father.
She nodded. “I’m in.”
Miss Information turned to the rest of the team. “Each one of you has a valuable skill. Tessa’s is leadership, and I want her in charge. If you have a problem with that, I have a couple starving tigers I’d like you to meet. Any questions?”
The BULLIES frowned but said nothing.
“Hooray!” she cried. “I’m glad everyone is happy. Let’s go back in time!”
“This is the backup facility for an international spy organization?” Ruby asked, staring up at the sign for Marty Mozzarella’s restaurant. The brightly colored logo was a big, grinning mouse wearing a Rastafarian hat.
“It is,” the principal said.
Ruby was speechless. Marty Mozzarella’s was a restaurant for little kids. The food was a crime against humanity: The pizza tasted like an old man’s slipper dipped in ketchup, the french fries were as soggy as a rag at a car wash, and the chicken fingers might well have been made from the fingers of an actual chicken. Plus, next to the tables, there were fifty decibel-busting video games that shook the air with blinks, bonks, beeps, and blasts.
“My dad brought me here for pizza and games once when I was little. It was fun until he found a dirty diaper in the ball pit,” Duncan said. “I haven’t been back since.”
Matilda gagged.
“Note to self: Do not eat in this restaurant,” Jackson said.
Flinch shrugged. “Speak for yourself. This place has the best food ever.”
Heathcliff didn’t care where they were headquartered. On the ride from the Playground he had switched back and forth from tears to bitterness. Ruby understood why he was so mad, but she had bigger problems on her hands than wiping tears off the face of former agent Choppers. Aside from having to run for her life from the president of the United States and being exposed as a spy, she had disappeared from her parents’ house, after shouting that she hated all her relatives. They must have discovered she was missing by now. Her whole family would be in a panic.
Once inside the dingy restaurant, Ruby’s allergies went haywire. Her lips swelled up, her fingers got puffy, and her ears ached. Her eyes watered like faucets and her swelling ankles threatened to split her sneakers. One look around explained why. She was in a restaurant filled with a mob of sticky-faced pre-kindergartners who wiped their runny noses on their hands and then wiped their hands on anything that didn’t move. But it was the actual employees that made her suffer the most. She was allergic to minimum-wage, dead-end jobs and hopelessness. She reached into her pocket for an allergy tablet and swallowed it dry.
Most of the team squeezed into a booth with the principal while Flinch, mesmerized by the lights and sounds, decided to have a look around.
“So, as you can tell, we’ve got a few problems,” the principal said, trying to shout over a robotic Marty and his vermin friends singing the Happy Birthday song to a screaming kid.
“What about our parents?” Jackson asked.
“Yeah, they’re going to be worried when we don’t come home,” Matilda said.
“And what are we going to do to protect them? I’m sure the Secret Service will want to question them. What if they’re taken into custody to try to force us out?” Duncan asked.
“Most of your parents are aware of your secret lives. I contacted everyone’s except for Heathcliff’s and Ruby’s.”
Heathcliff groaned, then got up and stomped off.
“I should go see them,” Ruby said.
“I think that is a terrible idea,” the principal said. “Going home will put them in danger. The Secret Service will be watching your house, and the second you show up they’ll have you. Right now, the best thing you can do is let your parents believe you ran away.”
Ruby was shocked by his idea. “You want to make them worry?”
“Your parents will call the cops and report you missing and the police will show up and do an investigation. With police in the house, the Secret Service and the CIA might keep their distance. All those cops and all those family members might buy us a little time until we can finish this mission. Ruby, I know you hate this idea, but it’s the best one we’ve got right now.”
A teenager in a mouse costume approached their booth.
“Excuse me, but is he with you?” he asked, pointing toward a candy machine. Inside were mounds of chocolates and sweets with a large mechanical claw above them. Flinch had his arm trapped inside the dispenser, yet he was singing with joy. “He’s scaring the other kids.”
“Oh, but the six-foot rat bringing them food isn’t freaking them out?” Jackson asked.
“Hey, don’t say ‘rat’ in here. I’m a mouse! Do you want the health department coming down on us?”
Duncan stood up. “I’ll go get him.”
“Thank you,” the mouse said as he rushed off to take an order.
Jackson’s braces whirred nervously. “Is this place safe? If they find us, it’s only a matter of time before we’re lab rats.”
“Hey, kid!” the man in the mouse suit shouted from across the room. “Shut it!”
“Sorry,” Jackson said sheepishly.
The principal shook his head. “This restaurant is completely off the grid,” he said. “Only myself, Agent Brand, and a few former directors even know it exists. Best of all, soon it will be completely operational. We’ll have the full science team here before long.”
Ruby looked around the restaurant. She hadn’t noticed at first, but most of the cooks were scientists from the Playground. Now, instead of lab coats, they were wearing T-shirts with MARTY MOZZARELLA on the front and sliding trays of garlic kno
ts into the ovens.
Duncan returned with Flinch, who was carrying a droopy slice of pepperoni and mushroom. “This place rules!”
Ruby turned to the principal. “What are we supposed to do in this dump?”
“This ‘dump’ is filled with massive computing power,” the principal said. He squeezed out of the booth, crossed the room, and pressed his hand on a game’s screen. A green light scanned his fingertips and then the game disappeared, replaced by an array of surveillance camera images from all over the world. “Every one of these arcade games has a hard drive with processor speeds far beyond anything we had at the Playground. The kitchen is stocked with the latest weaponry. There are surface-to-air missiles inside that robot squirrel over there.”
“So what’s the plan?” Matilda asked.
“The same as it was yesterday: Find Tessa Lipton. Only this time we’re not rescuing her. We’re bringing her to justice.”
“One suggestion!” Flinch cried, his mouth full of pizza. “Can we make this place our permanent headquarters? It’s amazing and the food is yum!”
“That looks like a Sit ’n Spin,” Funk snarled.
Tessa had to agree. Miss Information’s time machine appeared to be a very large version of a toy that caused her to throw up all over herself when she was four years old. Oh, what a delightful present that was, she thought. Hours of gut-wrenching fun!
“Are you sure you didn’t just swipe that from a playground?” Snot Rocket asked.
“We tried several designs, but this one promised to be the safest for the passengers,” the tired scientist replied. Tessa had learned her name was Dr. Rajkumar and that she was an expert on temporal physics—whatever that was.
“Why does it need to be safe?” Tammy screamed.
“Because it rips a hole in the fabric of time and space,” Dr. Rajkumar said. “To create the anomaly necessary for time travel, the machine has to generate power on the levels comparable to a supernova and—”
“Blah, blah, blah, science!” interrupted Miss Information. “So … how do we use it?”
“The passenger enters the precise date, time, longitude, and latitude into the control pad, then turns the wheel. A wormhole will open and everyone on board will be pulled through it. When your mission is complete, just press the HOME button and it will bring you back here.”