We Give a Squid a Wedgie (28 page)

“Don’t hiss at me!” He raised his foot to stomp on the lizard, and she sprang up and bit him on the toe.

“Ow!” he yelled. Within seconds he fell against the wall, pale and sweating.

“Beverly!” Celia cried. “I think she just killed that man.”

“No,” said the professor. “A bite that quick won’t kill him. It might make him wish he were dead, but after a few days of painful misery and discomfort, he’ll be as good as new. And, for some reason science has never fully explained, lima beans will taste better.”

“Hmm,” said Celia, who really didn’t like lima beans.

The crewman slumped to the floor, whimpering. Celia felt bad for him until she remembered that he didn’t seem to have a problem serving on Sir Edmund’s crew, leaving her father and brother behind as the volcano erupted, or holding her mom and Professor Rasmali-Greenberg prisoner.

Celia, Beverly, and Patrick slipped past the groaning crewman. The professor helped Celia’s mother follow along the gangway. She was still out of her wits.

“Yo-ho-ho,” Claire Navel sang as they crept along.

Celia rushed along the narrow passageway that stretched down the center of the ship. She heard the crew shouting above and froze every few feet
to make sure the coast was clear. When they came to an intersection, she stopped.

“Which way do we go?” she wondered aloud.

“Right! Right!” Celia’s mother called from the back of the group. “The right is right!”

“Your mother says to go right,” the professor repeated.

“But she’s crazy,” said Celia.

“But she’s right,” said the professor.

“How do you know?”

“Because madness often leads to inspiration,” he said. “Also, there’s a sign.”

He pointed to a sign at the corner just above Celia’s head. It had a map of the ship on it. The rafts were clearly labeled. This was much easier than aboard the pirates’ cruise ship.

Moments later, they found themselves creeping toward a stairway that led above deck.

“Well, no going back now,” said Celia.

She stepped onto the deck and her heart sank when she saw an empty space where the life rafts should have been.

“Sir Edmund is breaking the law,” the professor observed. “He is not supposed to travel without life rafts.”

None of the crew had noticed the escaped prisoners yet. They were all looking off the left—what sailors call the port—side of the ship.

Celia followed their gaze and saw the mysterious island engulfed in flame and ash and steam. The whole thing was crumbling into the sea.

“Oh no,” she whimpered, afraid that her father and brother and Corey were lost forever.

But then, a shadow formed in the haze. It grew clearer with every second. It was a raft with big sails cutting through the water toward them, a raft made of garbage. She could only make out two forms on board, but the way the littler one slouched as it moved about and the way the taller one pointed and gestured wildly made her feel sure that it was her brother and father.

“Where’s Corey?” she wondered.

“And what is that?” The professor pointed at a huge shadow, twice the size of the raft, racing toward it just below the surface of the water.

“The kraken,” whispered Celia’s mother. She grabbed Celia’s shoulder.

The shadow was charging right for the raft.

“TRIM THE MAINSAIL!”
Dr. Navel called out, and Oliver yanked the tangled bit of rope they’d attached to the big sail on their garbage raft. The raft rose slightly on its side as it picked up speed away from the island. Oliver couldn’t believe his father had managed to build a raft out of garbage in such a short time.

Its hull was a pile of driftwood lashed together with vines and torn plastic bags. Underneath, they’d attached an old fisherman’s net and filled it with empty plastic water bottles to make it float better. They had two masts made out of the hollow plastic pipes that one sometimes sees on construction sites, and two sails made from the yellow plastic of the ruined airline emergency raft.

Oliver almost felt hopeful as the wind blew
through his hair, the salt spray splashed his face, and they raced after Sir Edmund’s ship. Behind them, the island burned and cracked apart, vanishing into roiling sea and thick smoke as they fled. Glancing back at it as they left, Oliver truly understood the meaning of the word
cataclysm
. If that’s what had happened to Atlantis ten thousand years ago, it was no wonder no one had found it since.

“Your mother will be so proud!” Dr. Navel called out from his position on the rudder, which was made out of a broken paddle tied to the rusty propeller of an old airplane. “We’ll call this raft the
Trash-Tiki
!”

“What’s that?” Oliver asked, not even embarrassed to show his father that he was curious. It was the first time he could remember ever actually being impressed with his dad.

“After the
Kon-Tiki
.” His father smiled. “The famous raft Thor Heyerdahl used to cross the Pacific in 1947. He was an amazing explorer. We almost named you after him!”

Oliver didn’t feel much like a Thor, so he was glad his parents had decided against that name. The kids at school would have mocked him ruthlessly if he was named Thor Navel.

“So what do we do when we catch up with Sir Edmund’s ship?” Oliver asked.

“I’m not sure we can,” said his father. “The best we can do is follow them for now, and make sure they don’t get away with your mother and your sister.”

“And what about Corey?”

“He’ll be okay for a while,” said Dr. Navel. “The pirates will want to ransom him, so they won’t hurt him.”

It wasn’t exactly a comfort, but Oliver figured they could only follow one ship at a time. As they raced after Sir Edmund’s big whaling ship, the pirate cruise ship got farther and farther away. Somehow, though, Sir Edmund’s ship wasn’t getting farther away from their raft. It was getting closer.

“Look!” Oliver pointed. “Sir Edmund’s ship has stopped. We’re gaining on them!”

“We are!” Dr. Navel smiled. “We might just catch up with them yet!”

“We’ll need a plan,” said Oliver, walking back to where his father was steering the
Trash-Tiki
. “We can’t just storm the ship and demand they let Celia and Mom go, can we?”

“We could always try the Kathmandu Caper,” said Dr. Navel.

“What’s the Kathmandu Caper?” Oliver asked.

“Well, one of us will act like an angry goat while the other collects as many jellyfish as he can, and then—oh no!”

“What?” Oliver asked. His father pointed in the direction of Sir Edmund’s ship.

Oliver saw a dark shape in the water racing from the ship toward the
Trash-Tiki
. It was bigger than any shark or whale Oliver had ever seen on TV. It was bigger than their entire raft and it was moving much faster.

“Coming about!” Dr. Navel yelled. “Evasive maneuvers!”

Oliver ran to the forward sail and let the rope go free as Dr. Navel tried to turn the raft and get some speed in a different direction from whatever was coming at them. There was no time. The shadow was on them in seconds, an inky splotch in the ocean, blossoming beneath them with eight impossibly long arms. It hung for a moment in the water.

“The kraken,” Dr. Navel gulped.

“But
Beast Busters
said there was no such thing,” Oliver objected, just as the tentacles came alive, snapping tight and breaking the surface with slimy suckers glistening. As the tentacles rose into the sunlight and towered over their raft, sharp black fangs, each bigger than one of Oliver’s fists, unsheathed themselves from the suckers along the undersides of the tentacles.

“You can’t believe everything you see on TV,” said Dr. Navel as the first tentacle slashed the mainmast clean off. The rope attached to it whipped into the air and he dove to knock Oliver out of the way. Oliver hit the deck when his father pushed him, but another tentacle slapped down between them and coiled itself like a boa constrictor around his father, hoisting Dr. Navel toward the sky.

Oliver screamed. He tried to stand and catch his father’s foot, but the raft lurched violently to the side. One tentacle had wrapped around the back and the other around the front. The kraken pulled itself up halfway on the deck, its weight tearing the raft in two.

“I have an idea,” yelled Oliver, grabbing one of the old ropes they’d used to build the raft. “We have to give this squid a wedgie!”

“How do we give a squid a wedgie?” his father yelled, wriggling to free his arms from the giant tentacle.

“Catch the other end of the rope!” Oliver tossed the rope to his father. “Now pull!”

Oliver pulled his end and Dr. Navel pulled his end, and the rope tightened underneath the squid.

“It’s working!” Oliver called as the rope wedged itself into the monster’s underside.

Oliver, however, was hardly an ichthyologist, and failed to understand the basics of squid science. The underside was where the giant squid had its mouth, and the kraken, being the most fearsome of giant squid, had a mouth filled with fangs. Its jaw snapped shut and the rope snapped in two. Then the monster sucked the rope into its mouth the way one might suck in two strands of spaghetti.­ The slurping sounds echoed for miles across the ocean.

Oliver fell backward and the monster dunked Dr. Navel underwater and scooped him up again in a violent flurry of tentacles.

“I fear the kraken is wedgie proof!” his father spluttered, spitting seawater.

Oliver grabbed the forward mast and clung to it
as the enraged kraken lifted the whole
Trash-Tiki
out of the water. Its terrible face rose from the frothy foam—two heavy-lidded yellow eyes on either side of its head and a giant round mouth with rows and rows of pointed teeth. One leftover bit of rope was stuck between two of its fangs like a piece of floss. Water splashed in all directions. The tentacles flailed, so one second Oliver and his father were close enough to touch and in the next Oliver and the raft slammed into the water and his father was flung toward the sky again.

“Hold on, Ollie!” Dr. Navel yelled.

“AHH!” yelled Oliver back, shutting his eyes, too terrified to watch his dad shoved into the terrible jaws of the sea monster. He didn’t even object to being called Ollie.

And then, with a splash, all was quiet. Oliver was lying on his back on the deck of the
Trash-Tiki
. His father, panting, hung off the side, pulling himself out of the water. The giant squid was gone.

“What happened?” Oliver choked out.

“He just dropped me,” said Dr. Navel. “He just let go and vanished underwater again.”

Oliver pulled himself up onto his knees and
looked at the water below their broken raft. There was no inky shadow to be seen.

But then he heard shouts from Sir Edmund’s ship and looked up to see the giant black form speeding toward it. There on deck, now close enough to see, were Celia and their mother and Professor Rasmali-Greenberg and Beverly and Patrick, huddling together in terror.

There wasn’t just the one kraken around Sir ­Edmund’s ship, there were five, and they were all bigger than the one racing back toward them. As soon as it arrived, the pod of giant squid broke the surface of the water together to wage a new attack. This time on the research vessel
Serenity
.

CELIA WATCHED
as the first massive tentacle burst from the sea and, with one swipe, smashed the mainmast clean off of her father’s little raft. Another thick tentacle rose from the frothy water and wrapped itself around the back of the raft, a third whipped up and circled around her father, and even with the distance between them, Celia could hear her brother scream.

“Stop it!” Celia yelled. “Stop it!”

Sir Edmund looked down on her from the bridge.

“I’m afraid the kraken knows no mercy,” he said. “Now, what are you all doing out of your cells?”

Celia looked back toward the water, seeing her father hoisted high in the air and the gaping, fanged
mouth of the giant squid rising from the water. Oliver was clinging to the half-shattered raft as it was tossed back and forth by another of the giant squid’s arms.