Strike of the Sweepers

  “Umm,” Daisy said, “those are your biceps.”

  “Whatever,” said Dez. “You should worry about yourselves in there. I’ll be fine.”

  Spencer turned back to the letter from Olin and continued reading.

  “Creating with your mind will be hard at first, but the longer you remain in the Dustbin, the easier it gets. The Instigators have been there for hundreds of years.”

  “The alligators?” Dez said.

  “The Instigators,” Spencer corrected. “I don’t know who they are. I’m just reading.”

  “What else does it say?” Daisy asked.

  Spencer read on. “The Instigators are evil. You can never hope to match the strength of their creations. Long ago, Sach, Aryl, and I were their captives. The Founding Witches rescued us and helped us escape from the Dustbin. Do not attempt to find the Instigators. Get your friend and leave as quickly as possible.

  “Firing the leaf blower from within the Dustbin will create a Rip back to our world. It’ll only work once, and you’ll have only about ten minutes before it closes. You better not get stuck in there. I’m counting on you to take this blasted Pan off my neck.

  “Best of luck—Olin”

  Spencer sighed deeply and tucked the note back into his pocket. “Well,” he said to his companions. “Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” said Dez. “Can I have the garbage truck if I’m the only one who survives?”

  “Let me make sure I got this right,” Daisy said. “We get sucked into the Vortex, find Marv, create a Rip that gives us only ten minutes to get out. Then the four of us drive to Massachusetts, maneuver our way back through the traps in the construction site, enter the Port-a-Potty, break into the BEM lab, rescue the others, steal Belzora and the nail from Mr. Clean, and escape?”

  Spencer nodded wordlessly. Yep. That pretty much summed it up.

  Daisy smiled weakly. “Okay. Just checking.”

  Spencer lifted the radio to his face. “Did you get all that, Min?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “I managed to hear your plan and your quarrelsome banter.”

  “Is that your way of saying ‘good luck’?” Spencer asked.

  “Your plan is too long,” Min said. “It will take much more time than you can afford. Every second wasted puts the captured Rebels in danger.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Dez taunted.

  “Actually, I do,” said Min. “Leave a squeegee with your Thingamajunk in Welcher and take the other one with you into the Vortex. After the three of you get sucked into the vacuum bag, tell Bookworm to place the Vortex in his lunchbox head. As you spend time searching for Marv in the Dustbin, Bookworm will travel from trash to trash, arriving in Massachusetts much faster than you normally could. The Thingamajunk should easily be able to maneuver through the traps in the construction site, since he is made of nothing but Glopified garbage. He can deposit the Vortex inside the Port-a-Potty and return to Welcher. Meanwhile, you create the Rip inside the Vortex, and when you emerge with Marv, you will already be on your way into the heart of the enemy’s base, taking them by complete and utter surprise, with your return to Welcher secured by the squeegee there.”

  Spencer was grinning by the time the boy finished his elaborate plot. “Genius, Min. Pure genius. That’s why we pay you the big bucks.”

  “You haven’t paid me anything,” Min said over the radio. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m already late for my cello lesson.”

  “Jell-O lesson?” Dez scoffed.

  “He said cello,” corrected Daisy.

  Dez shrugged. “What’s that?”

  “A musical instrument,” she said.

  “If it’s not the tuba, it’s lame.”

  Spencer lifted the radio one last time. “Thanks, Min. Keep that book safe. The future of education is now resting on your shoulders.”

  “I will not fail,” he said. And then, “Min, out.”

  Spencer clipped the radio back onto his janitorial belt.

  “We’re not really going to follow his plan, right?” Dez said. “It was way confusing, with like, the Vortex in the lunchbox in the Port-a-Potty. I never know what that kid’s saying.”

  The pile of trash in the shed erupted, and Bookworm came loping toward them, his textbook mouth curved in a grin of success. He dropped down when he reached them, and Daisy scratched the side of the lunchbox as though he were a dog.

  “Okay,” Spencer said. “Let’s fill in Bookworm and work through the details of Min’s plan. Squeegees.”

  “Do we have a complete set?” asked Daisy.

  Spencer nodded. He unclipped one squeegee and set it on the lawn. “This is the one Earl was using. It stays here in Welcher,” he said. He patted the second squeegee handle on his belt. “This is the one Agnes used to bring us over to Massachusetts. It goes with us.”

  “We should probably do something with Big Bertha,” Daisy pointed out. “Plus it has Holga and the nail inside the glove compartment.”

  “Nobody can get in when it’s locked,” Spencer pointed out. “So the hammer should be safe. We’ll leave the truck key with Bookworm. He can park it somewhere safe and out of the way.”

  “Garbage driving the garbage truck?” Daisy said. She looked at her pet. “Do you know how to drive?”

  In answer, he hacked up an old hubcap. It rolled across the grass, and Daisy nodded.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Reluctantly, Dez pulled out the bulky key chain and tossed it to the Thingamajunk.

  “Now,” Spencer said, “we need to be somewhere enclosed when we puncture the Vortex.”

  “What about the shed?” Dez pointed.

  “The suction will be too strong,” Spencer answered. “It’ll rip the walls right out of the ground.”

  “The back of Big Bertha?” Daisy suggested.

  Spencer nodded. The vehicle was Glopified and reinforced. It should be able to withstand the suction. “That’ll work,” he said. “Once we disappear into the Vortex, Bookworm will pick us up and load the vacuum bag into his lunchbox.” Spencer turned to the Thingamajunk. “You got that, buddy?”

  Bookworm gave a thumbs-up. This time, his thumb was a bent spoon.

  “How fast can you get to Massachusetts?” Spencer asked.

  Bookworm thought about it for a second, and then hacked up a coupon that said, $90 off!

  Daisy picked up the ripped coupon and tucked it in her pocket. “That seems like a pretty good bargain,” she said.

  “You don’t even know what’s on sale,” Spencer pointed out. “Anyway, I think Bookworm was trying to say that it will take him ninety minutes to get from here to Massachusetts.”

  “Dumb garbage,” Dez muttered. “You can’t have ninety minutes. There’s only sixty minutes in an hour.”

  Spencer rolled his eyes, resisting the urge to call Dez the dumb garbage now. “Ninety minutes is an hour and a half.”

  “How will he find the construction site?” Daisy asked.

  Spencer was stumped for a moment. “Well, he can locate places if he’s eaten garbage from that region before. So if we had any kind of scrap from the construction site . . .”

  “Will this work?” Dez asked, pulling a wad of toilet paper from his back pocket.

  Spencer drew back in disgust. Toilet paper from Dez’s pocket didn’t seem like it could ever be a good thing.

  “It’s from the Port-a-Potty,” Dez explained.

  “Why do you have it?” Daisy asked.

  “I rolled some off when we were flying over the ocean.” He shrugged. “What? My nose was running.”

  “You don’t have a nose,” Daisy reminded him.

  “My beak was running,” Dez corrected. “I would have wiped it on Spencer’s sleeve, but he was too far away. So I used this instead.” He held out the snotty wad of toilet tissue.

  “That’s disgusting,” Spencer said. “I’m not making Bookworm eat that.”

  Dez shrugged and tossed the wad on the ground. Bookworm pounc
ed on it as though it were a piece of candy and gobbled it up in a flash.

  “You know where to go now?” Daisy asked.

  The Thingamajunk nodded.

  “Okay,” Spencer said. “So we just have to survive inside the Dustbin for an hour and a half.”

  “But I thought we only had ten minutes before the Rip thingy closed and we’re trapped forever down there,” Dez said.

  “I don’t have to use the leaf blower to open the Rip right away,” Spencer pointed out. “We can get inside the Dustbin and find Marv. Then, in ninety minutes, once Bookworm has dropped us in the Port-a-Potty, I can open the Rip.” Spencer grinned. “This is going to work, guys. Mr. Clean won’t even know what hit him.”

  “I don’t know,” Dez said. “I still see a lot of ways this could go wrong. Half the plan depends on a walking pile of garbage.” He pointed at Bookworm, who snarled.

  Daisy put a hand on her pet’s arm. “How are you feeling about this plan, Bookworm?”

  The Thingamajunk worked up an answer from deep within, spitting a chewed-up Nike sneaker on the ground.

  “Nike?” Daisy said. “You’re ready to run?”

  But Spencer got the true meaning and smiled. “I think what Bookworm wants to say is . . .” Spencer looked at the Thingamajunk. “Just do it.”

  Bookworm nodded vigorously, and the plan to save Marv was finally under way.

  Chapter 34

  “Did we die?”

  Spencer, Daisy, and Dez stood in the back of Big Bertha. Empty now of all her trash, the Glopified Garbage Truck 2.0 still smelled awful. Spencer took it as further motivation to get the job done quickly.

  He held the Vortex in one hand and a razorblade sword in the other. The highly Glopified leaf blower was strung across his back, tied in place with a piece of rope from Daisy’s garage.

  Big Bertha’s back hatch was closed, and it was almost entirely dark inside.

  “Ready when you are,” Daisy said nervously.

  Spencer hesitated, thinking through any last-minute aspect of his plan. There was one thing in the back of his mind. One thing he hadn’t dared mention to the others.

  Garth Hadley.

  If Marv was in the Dustbin, then that surely meant Garth Hadley and his BEM workers would be there too. Spencer thought of the BEM representative who had tricked him so long ago. Compared to the Sweepers and Pluggers he’d faced since, Garth hardly seemed like a threat. But the man was crafty. He’d used Spencer against the Rebels from the very beginning.

  If it came down to a face-to-face meeting with his old enemy, Spencer was determined not to be manipulated. He was an Auran, a Rebel, and a much more important piece of this story than Garth Hadley would ever be.

  Spencer felt one of Dez’s wings brush past him as the bully folded and unfolded them. “Hurry up, Doofus. It stinks back here.”

  Spencer’s attention turned back to the vacuum bag in his hand. “Okay,” he said. “Hold on.” Not that holding onto anything could prevent them from getting sucked into the high-powered Vortex.

  Spencer brought the razorblade up, the sharp tip hovering above the papery bag for just a moment. Then he thrust the blade into the Vortex.

  There was a deafening roar, like the sound of a thousand vacuums being turned on at once. A tornado of wind and suction rose from the rend in the bag, growing until it filled the back of Big Bertha.

  Daisy and Dez were instantly snatched into the whirlwind’s grasp. Spencer heard Daisy scream and vaguely saw Dez’s wings flapping hopelessly against the gust. The two kids circled above Spencer’s head, clanging into Big Bertha’s fortified walls. Then they were gone, sucked through the gateway Vortex and into the unknown of the Dustbin.

  Spencer’s hand slipped from the razorblade, and it was pulled out of sight. He was staring at the active hole in the bag, wondering how it was possible to fit through such a tiny tear. Would it hurt?

  His left hand was clamped, sweaty, to the edge of the bag. It took more courage than Spencer expected to let go of the Vortex. The moment he did, his feet came off the floor. He spun helplessly around, two or three complete revolutions, before he was pulled headfirst into the Vortex.

  He experienced a moment of sheer disorientation, completely unable to decide which way was up and which was down. He felt the wind’s pressure against his skin, pushing him, pulling him. There was a tightness to it, as though his body might get ripped apart at any second. But there was no pain.

  Spencer couldn’t keep his eyes open, and even if he had, there was nothing to see but utter blackness. He braced himself. For what? He didn’t know. This swirling, dizzying movement had to end sometime. But what if it didn’t? What if this was the Dustbin? What if it was nothing more than an endless gyroscopic existence?

  No sooner had Spencer considered this terrible idea than he slammed into something solid, knocking the breath from his lungs. He sat up, eyes wide and mouth agape, until he finally managed to suck in a giant gasp of air. He wondered why his coveralls hadn’t protected him from the impact. He felt for the zipper, realizing that the violent wind had pulled it down a few inches.

  Overhead, the twisting cyclone of the Vortex was fizzling out. Spencer’s white hair tousled once in the last whip of wind. Then the suction roar faded, the air became very still, and an absolute silence settled around him.

  The first thing Spencer noticed about his surroundings was the ground beneath him. At first, he thought it was soil, or maybe sand. But as he shifted his weight to stand up, he realized that the particles beneath him were much finer.

  Dust.

  It was soft, wrapping around his ankles and enveloping his tennis shoes like a powdery gray snow. Spencer looked up to see if he could glimpse the tear in the Vortex, but any indication of his entry point was gone.

  There was no sky above him, just a colorless, shapeless cloud of dust. It hung in an unmoving haze, as though every particle of dust was suspended in time, unwilling to settle to the ground. He felt claustrophobic, his vision limited by the seemingly endless grit in the air.

  Dust.

  “Did we die?” Daisy’s feeble voice floated up at Spencer’s left. He turned to her, noticing plenty of half-buried debris littering the dust around them. It looked like they were standing in a junkyard. Daisy grabbed the edge of a broken school desk and pulled herself to her feet.

  “Are we in heaven?” Daisy asked, taking a shaky step through the dust toward Spencer.

  Spencer refused to think that heaven could be so bland . . . and dusty.

  “Hey!” shouted another familiar voice. “I’m over here!”

  Spencer saw the bully a few feet away, using his taloned hand to punch a hole through a bookshelf that was leaning against him.

  “We’re definitely not in heaven,” Spencer said, “or Dez wouldn’t be here.”

  Spencer expected to feel that awful, gritty taste of dust between his teeth when he opened his mouth to speak. But here, it was different. The airborne particles of dust didn’t seem to bother his mouth at all, just as they didn’t bother his eyes. He grasped the zipper of his jumpsuit and cinched it tight again.

  Dez jumped into the air, his black wings unfurling. The flapping sent the dust particles into motion, swirling around his figure, filling in the space where he moved, and settling still once he had passed.

  Dez flew high, maybe twenty or thirty yards, until Spencer and Daisy could barely see him as a dark smudge in the hazy air.

  “I can’t see anything!” Dez shouted. From that distance, his voice sounded muffled, like a shout in a padded room. “Where are we?”

  The answer was simple. They were in the Dustbin. But what did that even mean? How would they find Marv when they could barely see what lay ahead?

  Something caught Spencer’s eye. It was a sheet of paper, mostly buried in the soft dust. There, at the top of the page, was a handwritten name.

  Spencer.

  And stranger still was the fact that Spencer immediately knew who had written it. He ha
d, seven months ago.

  He stooped and pulled the paper from the dust. Next to his name, a small 100% was written and circled in Mrs. Natcher’s red pen.

  “What’s that?” Daisy asked.

  “It’s my spelling test,” Spencer said.

  “You had enough time to take a spelling test down here?” Daisy said.

  “No,” Spencer explained. “I took it in Mrs. Natcher’s class back in September.” He read off some of the words on his list. “Pneumonia, aqueduct, colonel . . . don’t you remember this test? We took it the day after we made our mess at the ice cream social!”

  “I don’t get it,” Daisy said. “How did your spelling test end up in the Dustbin?”

  “It was in my desk when everything got sucked into the Vortex,” he answered. “Look around. It’s all here!”

  The debris around them made sense now. Desks, bookshelves, the teacher’s computer, tiles from the ceiling, strips of carpet from the floor. Even the classroom sink. Everything that had been sucked into the Vortex was here, burrowed into the thick, dusty ground.

  Dez landed, sinking to his shins in the powdery dust. “I can’t see a thing,” he said. “It’s just dust . . . everywhere.”

  “There has to be something out there,” Spencer said. “If the Vortex dumped its load right here, then that must mean that Marv was here too.”

  “That was months ago,” Daisy said. “He could be anywhere by now.”

  “Let’s just forget about Marv,” Dez said. He reached for the leaf blower, still strapped to Spencer’s back. “Fire that thing up and blast a way out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

  Spencer stepped out of Dez’s reach. “We’re looking for Marv,” he said. “Besides, it’s too soon to use the leaf blower. We have to give Bookworm at least an hour and a half to get the Vortex into the Port-a-Potty.”

  “So now what?” Daisy asked. “We just go wandering off into the dust?”

  “Let’s look for tracks,” Spencer said. “Marv would have left big tracks when he went wandering off.”

  Spencer stepped over a splintered cabinet and started inspecting the ground. Where the Vortex tornado had deposited them, the sedentary dust had been whipped into a dramatic swirl.