The Beast 2 Read online

  Scattered clapping.

  I don’t think they believed him.

  I don’t think they believed any of us was from the future. Even though Ashley and I really were.

  “Do kids have to go to school in the future?” a boy in the audience wanted to know.

  “No!” another member of the zombie troupe answered. “In the future children don’t have to go to school. They can sit at home and watch radio with pictures! Children of the Future are lucky.”

  “Yay for the future!” The kids in the audience broke out in cheers.

  “I only wish,” I whispered to Ashley.

  She shrugged. “Yeah, well, the Captain has his own ideas about the future.”

  Another question quickly followed the last. “How do you get around? By electric car?”

  “No!” a silver-costumed girl responded. “Children of the Future travel by jet pack! We can fly anywhere we like, any time we like.”

  “Gimme a break!” I murmured.

  “Is there a cure for the flu?” a man in the crowd asked.

  “In the future,” one of the other kids spoke up, “there is no disease. Everyone takes an anti-disease pill, and no one ever gets sick.”

  “Yeah, right,” Ashley muttered under her breath.

  The crowd didn’t seem to believe this any more than we did.

  They began to grumble. A few started to hiss and boo at us.

  I felt something jab me in the leg. A man was poking his cane through the bars at me. I tried to kick him.

  “Animal!” the man shouted, shaking his fist at me. “Freak.”

  The others joined in, calling us names. I felt something sting my forehead.

  I reached up and rubbed the spot.

  I looked down at the floor near my feet. It was a peanut. Someone had actually thrown a peanut at me!

  Kids in the audience began throwing them by the handful.

  Ashley and I ducked.

  “All right, ladies and gents!” Captain Time shouted, ringing the curtain shut. “Show’s over. Next show starts in twenty minutes. Get in line and purchase your tickets. Two bits a piece.”

  Ashley grabbed my hand.

  “We have to do this again in twenty minutes?” I asked.

  “Can you believe it? We have to do eighteen shows a day, James,” she told me. I followed her off the platform and into a room backstage.

  All the kids crowded into it, grumbling and whining. There wasn’t any furniture. Just bales of hay. Loose hay was spread on the packed dirt floor.

  The kids threw themselves down on the bales of hay.

  Most of them were scrawny. Their faces were pale and their eyes were hollow. Kids of the future didn’t look too lucky to me. Or too healthy, either.

  I pulled Ashley into the corner. I had a ton of questions on my mind.

  But she put a finger to my mouth. “Not here,” she warned. “The Captain’s spies are everywhere.

  She grabbed my hand and led me into another room no bigger than a large closet. It held a single beat-up couch.

  “The Captain lets me use this room,” she explained, taking a seat on the musty-smelling couch. “Because I’m the Princess.”

  “At least he gives you the princess treatment. Me, he handled like a punching bag.”

  Ashley shook her head. “You’ve just got to do what he says, James. Do what he says and he won’t hurt you. Sit down.” She patted the cushion next to her, and a puff of dust rose up.

  I sank down next to her. “So what is this place?” I demanded.

  “A carnival in Firelight Park,” she explained in a tired voice. “We’re definitely back in the park again. I don’t know what year. It’s nineteen thirty-something.”

  I nodded quickly. “Do all these kids come from the future?”

  “I can’t tell. Most of them are so tired and confused, I’m not sure they even know anymore. A lot of them are just runaways and orphans from this time. Captain Time tries to make all of us give the same stupid answers, anyway.”

  “Who is this guy?” I asked.

  “He runs the carnival,” Ashley explained. “He’s the son of the owner of Firelight Park. His father lets him run this carnival. He uses the money the carnival earns for his experiments.”

  “Experiments?” I asked. I remembered with a shudder the fish-boy in the tank.

  “All kinds of experiments,” Ashley explained. “But mostly, time travel.”

  I nodded. “I knew that capsule was a time machine the moment I saw it.”

  Ashley sighed. “What are we going to do, James?”

  It seemed pretty simple to me. “Ask Captain Time to send us back to the future?” I suggested.

  She tossed her head impatiently. “Don’t you think I’ve already asked him a dozen times? He won’t do it, James. I’ve begged. The harder I beg, the louder he says no. He wants to keep us here. Like prisoners.”

  I thought of the bales of hay in the room next door. “Like wild animals in a zoo. Then we’ve got to find a way to escape. We—”

  “There you are, Princess!” Captain Time strode briskly into the room.

  “Ah, Princess. Entertaining our newest time traveler, I see.” He flashed an oily smile and ran one white-gloved finger over the pencil-thin mustache.

  “This is my cousin, James Dickson. Say hello to the nice man, James.” Ashley shot me a meaningful look.

  His dark eyes lit up. “Cousins! That’s a first. I’ve transported cousins! Brilliant! Wait till I tell Father. He won’t believe me. None of them believe me. They think it’s all a hoax.

  “I am good, aren’t I?” he demanded. “I can transport human life through time. I’m a genius. A genius!”

  “Since you are a genius,” I suggested politely, “why don’t you return us back to our own time?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” he asked.

  “Because,” I explained to him carefully, “we want to go back to our own time and place.” Then I got braver. “You’re a kidnapper if you keep us here against our wills.”

  “Send us back,” Ashley joined in boldly. “Send us back, and we won’t press charges.”

  He smiled sadly. “Believe me, Princess. I’d love to send you back.”

  “Great!” we both exclaimed.

  “There’s only one little problem,” he added, shaking his head. “I don’t know how.”

  13

  I sprang to my feet. “You mean to say you can bring people back in time, but you can’t return them?” I cried.

  “Yes,” he replied sadly. “I’ve got the back part down pat. It’s the forward part I’m a little shaky on. Can’t get the hang of it at all.”

  He pulled a gold watch from the pocket of his trousers. He tapped the glass face. “It’s time to rest up. Only ten more minutes until the next show.”

  “What if we don’t want to do the show?” I demanded.

  He paused in the doorway and turned. “But you must. You have no choice. And you, Princess”—he waved long white-gloved fingers over at Ashley—“kindly stop making up your own answers to the audience’s questions. Just stick to the script.”

  Ashley snatched off her silver cap and shook out her blond hair. “And what if we don’t stick to the script?” she demanded.

  “Listen to me.” His voice fell to a deadly whisper as he moved closer to her. “Princess or no princess, you will do as I tell you. Is that crystal clear, Princess?”

  “Yes, sir!” Ashley gave a sullen salute.

  Captain Time glared at Ashley. “The last troublemaker found himself in a large tank of cold water covered with slimy green scales.”

  So I was right! Captain Time did turn that boy into a fish!

  Captain Time might be a genius. But he was an evil genius, I decided.

  “Do we have an understanding?” he asked.

  We both turned to the Captain at the same time and snapped to attention.

  “Yes, sir!” we barked.

  “As soon as Captain Time left, I ran
to the door and peered around the corner.

  The hallway was empty.

  I signaled to Ashley. “Come on. Let’s go!”

  Her eyes widened in fear. “You heard him. The show’s about to begin. We have to get ready. He always starts on time.”

  “Who cares? You mean to tell me you want to sit around here for the rest of your life doing eighteen shows a day? Let’s get out of here,” I urged.

  Ashley tucked her hair neatly back into her cap and sighed wearily. “Forget it, James.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “Forget it?” I repeated. “You mean you don’t want to escape?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to, James. But how far do you think we would get wearing these trick-or-treat costumes?”

  I stared at our costumes. We sparkled like a pair of foil-wrapped human hoagies.

  Ashley had a point.

  “Besides,” she added sensibly, “getting out of here won’t help us get back to our time.”

  I nodded and chewed my lower lip. “The time machine is in this building—right?”

  “So the best thing we can do until we can get near it,” Ashley explained, “is to behave like Captain Time’s good little Children of the Future. That way he’ll trust us. Or at least forget about us—”

  “Long enough for us to find a way out of here back to our own time,” I finished for her.

  So Ashley and I huddled together on the couch while she gave me a crash course on how to answer the audience’s questions about the future.

  What we ate. What we wore. How we slept. How we traveled. She even demonstrated how we danced.

  The dance was especially dumb.

  But I concentrated hard. I learned every step and memorized every word of Captain Time’s script for good, little, lucky Children of the Future.

  It was just like studying for a unit test.

  Only this was one test we had to pass. If we didn’t, we both knew what would happen.

  We would be left back.

  Back in the past.

  Forever.

  14

  I lay awake for hours. Bits of straw scratched my bare skin through the thin silver fabric of my costume.

  I breathed deeply, fake snoozing, until I thought the whole roomful of kids was sound asleep.

  Then I rolled over and shook Ashley awake.

  My cousin usually doesn’t react well when you wake her up in the middle of the night.

  When our families spent Christmas together one time years ago, we made a pact to wake up at three o’clock in the morning. We wanted to see if we could catch Santa Claus in the act.

  I went into Ashley’s room to wake her up—and she let out a scream that shook the house!

  No silent night for us.

  Both families came tearing in to see what terrible thing had happened.

  There I was, standing in my pajamas in the middle of the room. I mumbled something about Ashley having a nightmare. Pretty lame.

  Now, lying on the straw-strewn floor of our prison, I shook Ashley’s shoulder. She wouldn’t budge. Maybe she was dreaming about being home again.

  This was no time to dream. We were in the middle of a nightmare.

  Finally I took a piece of straw and stuck it up her nose.

  Good move.

  She wiggled her nose and sat up, glaring at me. “James—”

  “Shhhhhh.” I pressed my hand over her mouth. She stared at me with wide, frightened eyes.

  Around us, the other Children of the Future continued to snore.

  Slowly I took my hand off her mouth and helped her to her feet.

  We made our way through the dark room.

  Earlier, after the last show of the night, two tough-looking men in black bowler hats led us down the long hallway to another room. We sat at long picnic tables while they served us what looked like pig swill.

  Not that I’ve ever actually seen pig swill. But that’s what I imagined it looked like. It was bits of fat and gristle swimming in gray, greasy goop.

  It made the food in my school cafeteria look like a gourmet feast.

  I couldn’t believe that the other kids were shoveling the swill into their mouths with both hands.

  No way would Ashley and I touch the food. When no one was looking, we both dumped it onto the floor beneath the table.

  Afterward, the same two men herded us back into the room behind the stage. They told us to shut up and go to sleep.

  Most of the kids had fallen into an exhausted sleep immediately.

  So far so good.

  The door to the room behind the stage wasn’t locked. Captain Time probably figured there was nowhere we could go.

  I heard a sudden loud snort—and froze.

  A guard was asleep on duty. His chair tipped back against the wall. His bowler hat covered his eyes. His mouth was wide open, sucking in great big mouthfuls of air as he snored.

  I tiptoed past him, down the long hall, past the room where we had eaten, past the giant fish tank.

  We stopped long enough to peer inside. It was empty except for the tall orange and yellow fronds of seaweed waving eerily to and fro.

  What had happened to the fish-boy?

  Maybe the Captain let him out of the tank at night to sleep in a real bed.

  We passed the rows of doors and finally came out into a larger room. Ashley pointed.

  In the far corner stood the time machine.

  A greenish-yellow light shone out of its porthole windows. We ran toward it. As we approached, we heard a high-pitched hum.

  The Captain had made it easier for us. He had left the power on.

  Ashley ran ahead of me and yanked open the round door. “Come on, James,” she urged in a hushed whisper. “Let’s go.”

  I hesitated. “Go where? How?”

  But Ashley didn’t seem to care. She was already dropping onto the red seat. She patted the cushion next to her. “Out of here. That’s all that matters.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Hurry, James!”

  I stared hard at her. Her eyes were huge and glassy. Was this just another adventure to her? Didn’t she realize how serious this was?

  Reluctantly I climbed in beside her. I kept the door open. I hate closed-in spaces. I don’t even like sleeping in a tent.

  “Okay, James,” she said in a businesslike way. “Let’s try fiddling with some of these knobs.”

  I stared helplessly at the panel. Not a single one of the knobs, dials, or levers was labeled.

  Who knew what they did? Only the Captain. And the Captain was fast asleep.

  I hoped.

  Ashley leaned over me and swung the door shut.

  “Wouldn’t want to fall out in the middle of time,” she muttered.

  Very funny.

  Then she reached for the nearest knob. “Let’s try twisting this cute little knob to the left,” she chatted nervously. “Maybe the machine is programmed. Maybe the machine will just reverse itself and send us back.”

  “Ashley!” I warned.

  “What harm could it do?” she asked innocently.

  15

  I pulled her hand off the knob. “Have you lost your mind completely?” I demanded.

  Her blue eyes narrowed to slits. “No, James, but I think you have. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “Of course I do. But I want to get out of here in one piece. You don’t know the first thing about time travel, Ashley. I do. I’ve been reading all about it ever since last summer. Time travel can be very dangerous,” I told her.

  She sat back in her seat and folded her arms across her silver jumpsuit. She rolled her eyes.

  “All right. Tell me how dangerous.”

  I figured I’d tell it to her straight.

  “Time travel involves taking huge risks,” I told her. “But we don’t even have a way to judge the risk. We’re traveling blind. We have no idea where we might wind up.”

  “So?”

  “So? So we could easily pop up in th
e middle of a rock! Or at the bottom of an ocean. Or who knows where!” I explained.

  “All right, James.” She sighed. “I think I get the idea. But maybe we’d pop up safe and sound back at Paramount’s Kings Island. Or in our own beds. Or in your mom’s kitchen, just as she’s taking one of her chocolate pies out of the oven.”

  I nodded reluctantly. I could almost smell the chocolate pie.

  Ashley’s blue eyes sparkled. “Then don’t you think it’s worth the risk, James? I do. I say we go for it!”

  She reached for the knob.

  I eyed her tensely. But this time I didn’t try and stop her.

  I knew she wasn’t going to give up until she had tried to use the machine.

  I held my breath as she twisted the knob.

  The arrows on the dials didn’t move.

  Nothing happened.

  We stared at each other in disappointment.

  “Okay, try that blue lever next to it,” I suggested.

  Might as well keep at it until we got results.

  She pushed it down, an inch. We both braced ourselves.

  Again, nothing happened.

  She moved it another inch.

  The arrows on the dials started twitching. A high-pitched hum rose around us.

  Ashley turned to stare at me. Her blue eyes widened. Her face twisted in horror.

  “Noooooo!” she wailed.

  Spidery lines sprouted at the corners of her eyes and crawled down her cheeks, past her ears and onto her neck. As her skin wrinkled, her cheeks and ears sagged.

  Liver spots spread across her forehead and scalp. Her hair turned gray and fell out in clumps.

  Ashley cried out for help. Three of her teeth blackened and fell out over her gums. She caught them in a hand that looked like a claw.

  My cries joined hers. I felt the flesh shrink on my bones, and my spine curve like a bow.

  I felt my right eye droop down onto my cheek. Everything got blurry then.

  I heard an old man moaning. The old man was me.

  Part of me knew we were both aging at a rapid speed. That same part knew that if we didn’t do something soon to reverse it—we would die and turn into skeletons in seconds.

  But most of me just wanted to shrivel up and die—and get it over with!