The Last Last-Day-of-Summer Page 11

  Shouldn’t be here at all

  “What else aren’t you telling us, TimeStar?” Otto didn’t sense any malice from the man. But his story still didn’t seem . . . complete?

  Otto wondered if Sheed felt the same way, but suspected TimeStar had won him over with that “you especially” silliness. Otto circled that part and added a question.

  Entry #73

  “Yeah, Sheed. You especially.”

  Biggest lie of all? LIKELY!

  Sheed said, “Otto, you’re usually the one that deals with all the far-out stuff. If TimeStar says we’re all that in the future, and people worship us—”

  TimeStar interjected. “I said ‘were inspired by.’”

  “Close enough. What are we worried about, then? That means everything turns out okay.”

  Shadows grew across TimeStar’s face. “No. That’s not what it means. According to the historical records, this was supposed to be one of your easier adventures. You two stopped Mr. Flux back on Harkness Hill almost immediately. You barely got your hands dirty.”

  “How?” Otto asked.

  “He was going to use the camera on you. Freeze the both of you the same way you froze Fry. But, when he backed up to get the best shot, he tripped over a root, rolled down the hill with the camera. In the fall, the shutter got triggered with the camera angled at him, and he froze himself mid-tumble. He wouldn’t tell you anything, but you went looking for help and came across A.M. and P.M, who led you to the other Clock Watchers, who eventually led you to Witching Hour. That’s how I knew to find her. Once she explained everything to you, you went back to Flux and tricked him into unfreezing himself, which unfroze everything else. But none of that ever happened because—”

  “You appeared and prevented him from falling,” said Otto.

  TimeStar’s face sagged. “The reason these sorts of trips are outlawed by the Time Bureau is because people from the future should never change things about the past.” He nodded at Otto’s pad. “It’s important that you know that.”

  “Oh.” Otto said, and scribbled:

  Entry #74

  You shouldn’t change things about the past.

  TimeStar said, “As you see, me dropping in the way I did changed things.”

  Sheed bounced on his toes. “You should’ve told us sooner. Sure, you changed what was supposed to happen, but now we know how to stop him. If we take his picture and freeze him, he’ll have to reverse the whole thing.”

  Otto reviewed his notes, bothered by something . . . some deduction . . . that eluded him. Still, Sheed made a good point. “Yes, it stands to reason that the same tactic should work.”

  TimeStar shook his head. “It’s possible, but unlikely that you’ll get your shot. Remember, in the original timeline, he took his own picture accidentally. How can you duplicate such a random event? He sure won’t pose for you willingly.”

  “Thanks for those encouraging words,” said Sheed. “It’s really cool how you messed everything up, then tried to run back to your time.”

  TimeStar said, “I thought if I got out of the way, you two would figure this out on your own. I was never supposed to interfere, so the longer I’m here, the more things I might change.”

  Otto, still puzzling over the day’s notes, said, “Why come to Petey?”

  “He doesn’t believe it, and you may not either, but Petey’s one of the best inventors on the planet. When it comes to brilliant technical minds in Logan County, it’s him or Evangeleen Ellison, right?”

  Otto took note of that, too—​at least he didn’t say Wiki, ugh!

  But Petey? One of earth’s most inventive minds? Petey?!

  Sheed said, “Petey, why aren’t you frozen?”

  He shrugged. “I suspect it has something to do with this.” Petey unbuttoned his shirt and revealed some kind of glowing, heavily wired chest plate.

  “What is that?” Otto was suddenly worried their friend and longtime hardware clerk was a cyborg.

  “It’s for my allergies.” Petey buttoned his shirt again. “None of the nasal sprays or pills my doctor gave me were effective. So I built a temporal field generator that covers my entire body and shifts all allergens I come in contact with—​mold, pollen, ragweed—​two seconds into my past. I haven’t sneezed since I turned it on back in the spring. This whole basement’s outfitted with a similar technology. My theory is it makes me and everything in this room immune to time anomalies.”

  Okay.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, Petey.” TimeStar gripped the genius’s shoulders. “You can send your sneezes into the past. You do know something about time travel.”

  Bashful, Petey didn’t bother denying the things TimeStar said he was capable of. He simply pulled away and sat in the corner.

  Otto flipped back to previous notes, to Mr. Flux’s mention of Peter. “I don’t know about time travel, or your inventions, but I do know you’re connected to Mr. Flux somehow. Witching Hour told us he was created in a terrible moment of Missed Opportunity. I think that moment had something to do with Donny O’Doyle and the Lincoln play from when you were in high school. Do you remember it?”

  Otto retrieved the yearbook from his backpack and showed Petey the old drama club photo.

  “How do you know about that?” Petey’s cheeks blazed, and he turned to his workbench, sniffling, not from allergies. “You’re the Legendary Alston Boys—​of course you found out about that stupid play. That’s when I learned my place, fellas. Please leave me alone.”

  Sheed joined Otto. “Petey, we could really use you right now. You’d be helping us out, like at the hardware store.”

  Petey didn’t budge, so the boys went over to him. As they stood to either side of him, they spotted the wallet-size photo of a beaming Anna Archie pinned to a board above his workspace. Otto nudged Sheed and pointed.

  Sheed smirked. Petey liked Anna. Who knew?

  Holding up his palm, Sheed gave Otto the signal to back off while he tried a new tactic.

  “Petey,” Sheed said. “You know we do the save-Logan-County-thing a lot.”

  “Sure. You guys are great!”

  “Thanks. But, this is way over our heads. If you helped us, and we fixed this time freeze mess, we couldn’t take all the credit. We’d have to tell Mayor Ahmed. He’d have to tell the guy who makes Keys to the City. That guy might have to—” Sheed snapped his fingers, as if a new thought popped into his head. “Otto, where do they get the metal to make Keys to the City?”

  “Mr. Archie.”

  Petey nodded. “I remember helping with the order the last time that happened. I did the engraving. It was a key for the Ellison girls.”

  Otto scowled. “How big was it?”

  Sheed slugged him in the shoulder. “However big it was, the key they make for this adventure is bound to be the biggest of all. It would have to be to fit all three of our names on it.”

  Petey perked up. “Three names?”

  “If you help us, your name goes on the key, too. You couldn’t engrave it yourself, though. It’s bad luck. Who else at the store does engravings?”

  “Anna.” Petey’s voice was light and dreamy. “She’s great at engraving. She’s great at everything.”

  That might have been the first positive thing they’d ever heard him say.

  “There you go. If you help us, when we get the Key to the City, Anna can engrave all of our names on it. Heck, yours might be the biggest name she engraves. You could even keep the key here in your workshop.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” Otto said.

  Sheed punched him again. The key was less important than the recognition—​or rather, who would be recognizing Petey. As observant as Otto was, how did he not see the total crush Petey had on Anna Archie? How much other obvious stuff had he missed?

  Sheed’s fast talk pulled the dour clerk to their side. Petey left his bench and tore one of his strange schematics off the corkboard wall. “If you guys want to take a picture of that Mr. Flux,
I think I have a way to make him stand still.”

  Otto, Sheed, and TimeStar gathered around, eyeing Petey’s design.

  “What is it?” Otto asked.

  Petey said, “You ever hear of flypaper?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “So imagine the fly is really big.”

  25

  Beware of Garden Pests

  Sheed had been worried about whether a human trap would work on someone who wasn’t human, so he was really enthusiastic about Petey’s Giant Flypaper. Regular flypaper was sticky and smelled like things flies liked, so they got drawn to it. Petey’s design wasn’t exactly that. He didn’t know what Mr. Flux liked to smell.

  “Cinnamon buns,” Petey said, “are something everyone likes smelling. My trap isn’t based on smell, but I’m going to add Cinnamon Bun scent just to be safe.”

  “Do what you think is best,” said Sheed.

  While smell was not the primary bait, Petey’s workshop became much more pleasant when it smelled like dessert. The actual bait wasn’t based in smell at all. “It’s going to be that camera.”

  Otto clutched it protectively when Petey pointed.

  TimeStar said, “You want to use that thing as bait? What if the trap goes wrong and Flux actually gets it? There would be no hope.”

  Petey got frowny and like his normal self again, abandoned his design on the worktable. “You’re right. It won’t work. Sorry, guys.”

  “No!” Otto and Sheed shouted, giving TimeStar dirty looks.

  “It’s a great plan,” Otto said.

  “Really sweet! And I’m not talking about the cinnamon bun smell.”

  Now Otto wished TimeStar had figured a way to go home. His meddling was making things harder. Scrambling to save the plan—​and Petey’s confidence—​Otto said, “What if we pretended the camera was bait?”

  “How so?”

  “We make something that looks like the camera. I take it, and I become the bait.”

  Sheed said, “Otto, naw.”

  Yes. This was perfect. Also, it was a good way to get his name first and biggest on their next Key to the City. Take that, Wiki! “Mr. Flux has already seen me with the camera, so it won’t seem strange when I’m the one luring him into the trap. Sheed, you can hold on to the real camera and hide out with Petey and TimeStar.”

  Sheed shook his head. “If something goes wrong, Mr. Flux will have you.”

  “Petey’s plan is solid. Nothing will go wrong. Right?”

  Sheed, reluctant but understanding the need to preserve Petey’s confidence, said, “Right.”

  Otto scowled at TimeStar. “Right?”

  “Right,” said TimeStar.

  Otto said, “Great. Petey, tell us how we set this trap.”

  “This particular design will only work in one place. My ma’s garden.” He snapped his fingers several times, pointed at various wooden crates around the workshop. “Grab those boxes, and let’s go outside to set up.”

  Everyone did as told, grabbing boxes that were big but surprisingly light. Otto could’ve thrown his like a football. Sheed looked like a circus strongman lifting his one-handed.

  TimeStar said, “These boxes should weigh more, shouldn’t they? The size alone.”

  Petey held a bag open, whistled, and his drone tools hovered from their racked positions into the sack. “I’m usually here by myself. With no help, I had to find a way to move heavy items on my own. Those boxes are equipped with gravity dampeners I activated when I snapped my fingers. They make whatever I put in them nearly weightless.”

  Otto’s jaw dropped. Every single one of Petey’s inventions seemed like something out of the wildest sci-fi comics and movies. The kind of stuff that turned inventors into gazillionaires. And he was keeping it all to himself here in this basement.

  Though, Otto supposed, the flip side was someone like Leen Ellison, who failed to keep her inventions contained anywhere, usually resulting in mayhem. Maybe Petey was being extremely responsible, though Otto’s deductive mind considered that unlikely. Whatever Petey’s missed opportunity was, it had to have something to do with all these far-out gadgets and his lack of confidence.

  Otto copied Sheed’s one-handed grip on his own bulky box, took it a step further, balancing the crate on one finger. “This is awesome, Petey.”

  “Thanks. Be sure not to hold those boxes over your head, though. The dampener technology is glitchy, so you don’t want a fully weighted box falling on you if there’s suddenly an outage. They weigh about a thousand pounds each. Let’s go to the garden.”

  Petey led the way, and everyone followed with their crates now held at arm’s length. As fantastic as the technology was, no one wanted to be crushed like a bug if it went haywire.

  Petey’s backyard didn’t have any of the eerie sameness the front of this neighborhood’s homes displayed. While the yard on the immediate left contained a pink bucket-like aboveground pool and the house to the right boasted a trampoline, Petey’s yard was dense with foliage. Thick hedges created a rectangular perimeter along the property line. Inside the hedge wall was a single apple tree, a colorful flower garden with a huge, ragged hole in its center, tilled rows of growing vegetables—​stumpy green zucchinis, bright yellow squash, and a patch of neatly trimmed grass, where they began setting the trap.

  Petey’s time-stuck mother was there, too, gripping a garden hose with a suspended spray of water misting over her flowers.

  “Hey, Ma,” Petey said, unpacking equipment.

  “Hey, Lovebug,” she said. “You’ve brought friends over. It’s the first time in, oh, ever.”

  “This is Otto, Sheed, and TimeStar. I’m helping them fix whatever’s going on today.”

  “You’re so helpful, Bug.”

  Everyone greeted Petey’s mom with a “hi, Missus Thunkle,” then unpacked crates at Petey’s direction. Before long, they had big patches of metallic sheets—​the “flypaper”—​unspooled and placed at various points throughout the yard. Once those were laid, Petey ran cables from the sheets back to the house, connecting them all to a small generator.

  “These become sticky when I turn the power on. When I turn them off, whatever’s trapped is free,” Petey explained.

  Otto worked at concealing the power cables in the grass and dirt. “What made you build big flytraps?”

  He chuckled. “I suppose that was a faulty comparison. It’s not for flies. It’s for mutant moles.”

  Otto, Sheed, and TimeStar stopped concealing cables, startled.

  Otto said, “Did you say mutant moles?”

  Pointing at the hole—​roughly the size of a truck tire—​in his mother’s flower garden, Petey said, “Yep.”

  Sheed said, “Otto . . .”

  His pad was out and open. “Already writing it down.”

  With the traps laid, Petey approached Otto, stared at the camera a moment. He produced some new device from his pocket. Small, cylindrical. He pointed, clicked a button, and several laser beams shot from the device, tracing over the camera. The device cut off abruptly. Petey said, “Be right back.”

  He disappeared into the basement. TimeStar approached the boys, sticking particularly close to Sheed. “Hey, that was pretty clever how you convinced Petey to help. You’ve always been a quick thinker,” TimeStar said, then added, “according to historians.”

  Sheed grinned. “I guess I did sort of wing that. I’m glad it turned out okay.”

  Otto sighed. If TimeStar really was from the future, and really was a fan, then it was clear which Legendary Alston Boy was his favorite. Sheed’s head was going to get so big from this. After they finished with Flux, they’d have to make sending TimeStar back to whenever he came from a priority if Sheed was ever going to fit through a doorway again.

  Petey emerged holding another camera that looked identical to the one that had caused all their problems.

  Sheed took it, turned it over in his hands, showed it to his number one fan. TimeStar admired it, too.

  �
�How?” Sheed asked.

  “That’s just your basic 3-D printing technology. Typically something that detailed would take hours, but my printer design works in a fraction of the time. This copy can even produce a flash when you press the shutter release, though no actual photos.”

  There were a few more moments of marveling before Otto interrupted all the awe. “Trap’s set. We’ve got our fake camera. How do we get Mr. Flux here?”

  TimeStar stepped forward, fished something from his jacket. “Leave that to me.”

  What he produced looked like the pistol their PE teacher used to start races on field day, but with dials on the side.

  TimeStar said, “Basic flare gun. Well, basic in the future.” He twisted the dials. “The default setting is typically ‘help,’ but you can customize as the situation allows.”

  After the final dial twist, he fired a brilliant red flare into the sky. It shot hundreds of feet in the air, as bright and beautiful as Fourth of July fireworks. Somewhere short of the clouds, it exploded into four red letters that sizzled the daytime sky.

  FLUX.

  TimeStar said, “Places, everyone. It won’t be long now.”

  26

  The Bad Times

  It was long. Agonizingly so.

  Otto caught a charley horse from standing in one spot with the fake camera and had to hop on one leg. Sheed dozed in the bushes next to Petey, whose confidence waned with every passing—​or nonpassing—​second. TimeStar stared at the last letter in his futuristic FLUX flare fizzling out completely, leaving unmarred sky and unmoving clouds behind.

  Tired of being unused bait, Otto said, “I don’t think he’s coming, guys. Petey, cut off the fly/mole paper. “

  Sheed jerked awake, the real time-freezing camera dangling around his neck. “Huh—​wha?”

  Petey flipped the switch on his control panel, and there was a crackle of static electricity in the air as the trap powered down. “This probably would’ve worked if I wasn’t involved.”