Milo Speck, Accidental Agent, page 14
The ogre pawed through the rubble until he found his prey. “Come with me, Dr. Lunch!” he said, scooping up Lyndon’s limp body. He sniffed, then backed cautiously away from the demolished lectern and ducked behind the silver screen, all the while muttering things like “mine, all mine” and “ranch dressing.”
Milo felt Tuck shudder behind him. “You know he was going to feed us to the ogres, right?” he said
“I know,” said Tuck. “But I still wish we could have captured him instead. Maybe brought him back to the Agency and made him stand trial instead of …”
Milo twisted around to look Tuck in the eye. “We did what could be done.” Dad and that boy were safe. Jane and Ernesto and Little Dude were safe. Now all Milo had to do was say the oath, and he and Tuck would be safe too. “Everyone is safe now.”
“Unless,” said Tuck, pointing to the SuperDry 2000, “that thing actually works.”
Tuck was right. The SuperDry 2000 was still roaring away on the stage, its door propped open, the gleaming whazzit tucked neatly in place. How long before the ogres stopped hitting each other with folding chairs and realized they could put the dryer to use? They might capture dozens, maybe hundreds, of kids before any agents arrived.
Milo looked around the room. The ogres were still battling. Most had lost their glasses as well as their wigs. All he and Tuck needed to do was fly Gilgamesh to the dryer and pop the whazzit out of its spot. How hard could that be? “As soon as I reach that boy, you’ll call the zipper and go home,” his father had said. And Milo had promised they would.
Well. They were going. They were just grabbing the whazzit on the way.
“You’ve got a plan, don’t you?” said Tuck.
With a flick of the shoelace, they were off, Gilgamesh gliding from the top of the washer to a spot in front of the SuperDry 2000. The machine was even bigger than it appeared on the screen, and it roared like a jet engine. A strong wind pulled at Milo’s clothes.
The dryer sat on a marble pedestal that was nearly as tall as Gilgamesh. From their seat upon the turkey, Milo and Tuck were just tall enough to see the edge of the whazzit. It would not be easy to reach. They eased closer to the dryer opening. “Steady, buddy.” Milo kicked off his slippers. “Easy, now.” Slowly, one bare foot at a time, he stood up on the turkey’s broad back. “Fork,” he said. Tuck handed him the fork, then held tight to his legs to keep him from falling. Milo hefted the utensil over his head, pushed the tines into the narrow seam between the whazzit and the dryer wall, and pulled down with all his might.
The whazzit did not budge.
“Let go of my legs.” Milo lifted his feet, hoping his full weight would help pry the whazzit loose. Nothing. The hinges at the base of the gadget were doing their job. The whazzit would do what it was designed to do. The dryer would not explode. Children would be caught.
“Figures,” said Milo, dropping back onto Gilgamesh. A cloud of dust and mulch rose from the bird’s feathers and tickled his nose. Milo sneezed.
And then it came to him.
He looked over his shoulder. The ogre battle actually seemed to have intensified. Milo tossed Tuck the shoelace reins. “Keep Gilgamesh steady, okay?”
“What are you going to do?”
“There’s no time to explain. Trust me.”
An uneasy look flickered on Tuck’s face.
“I’m not like Lyndon, okay?” said Milo. “We’re in this together.”
Tuck straightened the Excellence medal on his chest. “Stop being mushy, Speck. Get on with it.”
Milo stood again. He pulled himself up onto the still-stuck fork and shimmied over to the dryer wall. The dryer roared. Hot air sucked at his hair and his clothes, threatening to pull him inside, but he held tight to the fork until he found what he was looking for.
There it was. The lint trap. Other than its enormous size, it was exactly like the one in his dryer at home, with a long plastic edge for lifting the screen out of its slot and removing whatever dust and debris had collected as the dryer did its work. Milo grabbed hold of the plastic edge, pulled himself across the whazzit, then stepped over the lint screen, turning so that his back was to the dryer drum, his toes clinging to the tiny ledge between it and the lint trap. Now he could look out at the room of battling ogres, but he tried not to. Instead, he kept his eyes on Tuck and the wind-ruffled feathers of Gilgamesh.
With a great heave, he lifted the screen, drawing it up as high as he could reach. A good ogre inch remained in the slot. Milo stood tall and held tight, looking through the screen at Tuck.
“Dance with me!” he shouted over the roar of the dryer.
“What?”
“Dance!” hollered Milo. He began to sing as loud as he could. “First you flap and then you flap, then you wiggle and you wiggle, then stomp your feet.” Tuck joined in. “First you flap and then you flap, then you wiggle and you wiggle, then stomp your feet. C’mon, Gilgamesh! Dance!”
Gilgamesh danced. With every flap and wiggle, clouds of dust and bits of dried leaf rose from the turkey’s feathers and were sucked straight toward the dryer, catching in the lint trap that Milo held up before him.
“Then you flap and then you flap, and you wiggle and you wiggle,” Milo sang as clumps of carpet fiber and turkey down filled the screen. All he had to do was hold on. Once the trap was completely filled, he would jam it back down into place and—if he was right—he could shake the debris loose and clog the tiny vent behind it.
If they were lucky, the lint would catch fire and the dryer would explode, destroying itself and the whazzit.
“Then stomp your feet!” Milo sang. The screen was almost completely covered now, and Tuck and Gilgamesh were obscured from view. It was time. Milo shoved the screen deep into its slot, then shook it up and down as hard as he could to loosen all that had been trapped. Each time he raised the screen, less lint clung to it. He could almost picture the vent filling with turkey down and mulch, and it felt as if the air around him was growing hotter.
“It’s working!” he hollered to Tuck. “I’m coming back out now!” He looked through the screen to give her a triumphant smile—only to find his grin matched by that of Roger, the singing security ogre. Roger had Gilgamesh by the neck. In his other hand was the Head of the Tuckerman Agency.
“Tuck!” yelled Milo.
“You got me in a lot of trouble, Tuckerman. But you ain’t gonna get away this time. Wait till I show my boss what I caught!” With a laugh, he hurled both girl and bird into the dryer.
Wurble-wurble, warned Gilgamesh, as he, Tuck, and Milo collided. Milo lost hold of the lint screen and tumbled into the roaring dryer drum, thumping again and again against its hard metal walls.
“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back!” The security ogre pulled the screwdriver from the hinge and slammed the dryer door, leaving Milo, Tuck, and Gilgamesh spinning and thudding in the dark.
“Call the zipper!” yelled Tuck.
Desperately, Milo tried to remember the oath. “I swear as a Tuckerman Agent …” he began. A bright red light flashed inside the dryer. Milo heard a crackle and a hiss. He smelled smoke and burning feathers. The light flashed again.
“No!” hollered Milo as he banged hard against the dryer barrel. His head swam, and then …
Boom!
28
Heaven
For a long time, Milo had the sensation of spinning. And then falling. And then, somehow, rising. Am I dead? he wondered. Am I going to heaven?
A sudden bright light nearly blinded him. Milo felt something poke his leg.
“What are you doing in there?” said a voice he knew very well. It was not the voice of an angel. It was the voice of Grandmother.
Milo blinked and looked around. He was not in heaven. He was folded—origami-esque—inside the uncomfortably cramped drum of his basement clothes dryer.
In the books that Milo read, it was sometimes the case that the hero bumped his head and was transported to another world where he had some dramatic adventure, only to wake up in a hospital or in his own bed and discover that his entire experience had been nothing more than a dream. He had always felt cheated at the end of such books and could not help feeling that way now.
“Figures,” he said as he climbed out of the dryer.
“‘Figures’ is right.” Grandmother slammed the dryer door. “What’s that all over those pants? How did you shrink that new shirt?”
Milo held out an arm. His ducky shirt had shrunk. The sleeves were a good three inches shorter than they had been this morning. His pants were shorter too.
“Go upstairs and change,” ordered Grandmother just as a metallic knock echoed inside the dryer.
“Excuse me,” said a voice.
Grandmother screamed, and Milo flung open the dryer door. “Tuck!” he cried. It had not been a dream. It had not been a dream at all! “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said, crawling out of the dryer barrel. “Hey, Junior Speck, you don’t look so junior anymore. Good thing, too. I was worried you wouldn’t meet the height requirement for some of the training centers.”
“Training centers?”
“If you’re going to be a Tuckerman Agent, you’re going to need proper training,” said Tuck. “We all do.”
Wurble-wurble. Grandmother screamed again as Gilgamesh appeared. Unlike Milo, who seemed to have grown during his dryer transport, the bird had shrunk quite noticeably. He was now no bigger than a parrot.
“What is that?!” Grandmother’s eyes were wide and she hopped from one foot to the other, like a cartoon lady who had just seen a mouse.
“He’s a turkey. His name is Gilgamesh,” said Milo.
“If you think for one second that I’m going to be responsible for another—”
A loud ring shocked her into screaming once more. This time the sound did not come from inside the clothes dryer, but from the pocket of Grandmother’s housecoat. “Oh, my nerves,” she muttered, pulling out a shiny metal device.
“Hey,” said Milo. “That’s a ZoomBaby!”
“It’s a nuisance,” Grandmother grumbled. “Your father makes me carry it around, but if I turn it on, it buzzes and beeps at me. Off, stupid thing. OFF!” She poked the screen so violently, Milo was certain it would shatter.
“Let me,” he said, quickly taking the glowing device from her massive hands. On the screen was the now-familiar Tracker grid. In the center was the equally familiar red dot that Milo knew indicated the location of the ZoomBaby he held. HOME it said above the dot.
Tuck looked over his shoulder. “We’ve finally got a signal, so we can see who’s who.” She tapped a blue dot that hovered a few centimeters from the first. The dot, as it turned out, was not actually one dot, but many, and as Tuck zoomed in, Milo could see at least fifty names scroll across the screen, though only one of them mattered to him.
“There!” cried Milo. “Right there! Samson Speck! Where is he, Tuck? Where’s my dad?”
Tuck tapped the ZoomBaby again, and four words appeared on the screen:
GUINEVERE’S
PIZZA AND SUBS.
29
No Shoes, No Service
It took Milo and Tuck several minutes to convince Grandmother that the now-diminutive Gilgamesh would not attack her while they were gone, and several more minutes were spent in Milo’s fruitless quest for footwear. His slippers were back in Ogregon, and, thanks to his dryer-travel growth spurt, his feet no longer fit into any of his Barely Boys shoes, but he was not ready to fill his father’s shoes yet either. In the end, despite the Thanksgiving Day snow that had just begun to fall, he had no choice but to go without, and so it was that when he and Tuck burst into the warm, tomato-scented lobby of his favorite pizza place, Milo did so barefoot.
Dad didn’t even notice.
“Milo!” he cried, sweeping his son into his arms. “You’re safe! You’re both safe!” A great deal of laughing and swinging and squeezing ensued before Milo’s feet touched the cool tile floor again. “Let me look at you, son. Is it possible that you’ve grown?”
“I think I stretched in the dryer,” said Milo.
“And Tuck!” Dad looked as if he wanted to hug her, too, but instead he extended a hand, which Tuck shook with enthusiasm. “You’re safe. When I zipped back home and you two weren’t here, I was afraid something terrible had happened. The Tuckerman rescue team was already on its way to Ogregon and I wanted to go with them, but nobody would take me, since I had been fired.”
Tuck winced. “I’m sorry. I’ll get you reinstated as soon as I can. I swear.”
Dad waved her worries away. “It wasn’t your fault. I know that. Everyone knows that now. Someone logged me into a ZoomBaby so I could watch the team’s progress, but the network still isn’t working in Ogregon. I had to wait for someone to zip back with news. They reached Ogregon just in time to witness your heroism, but before they could reach you … they thought you had been caught in the explosion. They thought …” Dad’s voice cracked. “But then Grandmother called about a vicious attack-chicken prowling the basement and eventually got around to mentioning that you and Tuck were on your way here. What happened? I want to hear everything. Wait—” Dad hugged Milo again, then hurried to the dining room doorway to flag the hostess. “Guinevere? Can we get a booth?”
A plump woman with wiry red hair and a regal air appeared. “I’d be happy to seat you, but I don’t believe a booth will be large enough,” she said as Jane, Ernesto, and Little Dude raced into the lobby behind her.
“¡Patito!” A small, round-faced boy rushed to Milo’s side and hugged his legs.
“Little Dude!” said Milo.
“Glad to see you, guys,” said Jane. “What happened? You okay? Did you catch that bad guy?”
“An angry ogre took care of that for us,” said Tuck. The smile that had been growing on her face was gone. Lyndon had betrayed her. He had let her father die and had been ready to have her killed, too. And yet, Milo realized, it must have been awful to see the man who had been a father figure to her Squashed like that.
“Less talking, more eating,” interrupted Guinevere. “I’m going to put you in the party room, since this seems like a celebration. Plus”—she looked at Tuck—“it will give you a little privacy. Samson, why don’t you lead the way?”
As they all turned to follow Dad to the party room, Milo felt a hand on his shoulder. “Just a minute, young man,” said the regal hostess. She plucked a piece of moldy sandwich from his ducky shirt. “I won’t have you parading through my dining room looking—and smelling—like this.” She looked at Milo’s feet and then over at the NO SHOES, NO SERVICE sign.
“But, I just—”
“Rules are rules.” Guinevere strode to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and waved Milo toward it. “Come along. I’ve got some spare uniforms in here.”
Milo had seen the Guinevere’s Pizza and Subs uniforms before. With the exception of Guinevere, every employee in the place wore a brightly colored jester’s outfit, complete with curly-toed shoes and a sproingy hat adorned with bells. Milo had felt sorry for them every time he and his dad had come in for a slice.
“I don’t—” started Milo, but then Guinevere looked at the NO SHOES sign again.
Fine. He had been wearing a googly-eyed ducky shirt all day. How much worse could a jester’s outfit be?
Guinevere pulled open the Employees Only door. Behind it lay a large wood-paneled room. A painting of a knight with a needle sword and a button shield hung on the wall. A nearby desk was covered with snack-food wrappers. Milo recognized the place instantly.
“Holy smokes! Tuckerman Headquarters is part of Guinevere’s Pizza and Subs?”
Guinevere laughed. “Guinevere’s is part of Tuckerman Agency Headquarters. This is just a spare Agency office we use for transport and storage. The real nexus of the place is a floor beneath us.” She tapped a wall panel, which slid away to reveal a tidy closet filled with crisp navy suits, pristine white shirts, and neat rows of shiny brown shoes.
“Tuckerman Agency uniforms!” said Milo. He almost laughed.
“What did you think? You and Ms. Tuck would return from destroying that whizz-bang thing—”
“Whazzit,” said Milo.
“Yes, whazzit—and I’d welcome you home by dressing you up like one of my busboys?”
“I wasn’t sure …” said Milo, though in truth, he was no longer thinking about uniforms. “The whazzit was destroyed? Are you sure?”
“One hundred percent sure. Every ogre in the place ran away screaming after you blew up that dryer. Our rescue agents rushed in to see if they could find you and Ms. Tuck. They didn’t, of course, but they did find the pieces of the whazzit—all beyond repair.”
They had done it. Their plan had worked. He and Tuck had destroyed the whazzit.
Guinevere had turned her attention back to the closet. “Stand here,” she said, steering Milo toward a mirror. She draped a Tuckerman Agency jacket over his shoulders to check the size.
“There you are,” she said.
And there he was.
Milo Speck, Tuckerman Agent.
Barefoot. A purple bruise on his forehead. A googly-eyed ducky on his chest. But taller. Stronger-looking than he had been that morning. And smiling. Milo couldn’t help smiling.
“I wish your mother could see you now,” said Guinevere. “She’ll be so proud when she hears what you’ve done.”
Milo met Guinevere’s eyes in the mirror. “You think she’s alive?”
“Of course she’s alive. Eleanor Speck is a top agent. A smart cookie, and wholly dedicated to her work. Nothing is going to get in the way of your mother finishing what she started—whether that is some secret independent mission, or reuniting with her family.” She patted him gently on the shoulder, and Milo looked at his reflection again.
He was a Tuckerman Agent, ready to start training. Which meant that whether Dad was one or not, they could zip wherever they needed to search for Mom. Eventually, they would find her. He and Dad would do all that could be done. Together.
“I’m going to bring a new jacket to Ms. Tuck and leave you to get dressed. Do you have everything? Shirt, suit, shoes … oh, I almost forgot!” Guinevere opened a narrow drawer and pulled out a pair of socks. They were navy blue with spots. Or dots. “Check to make sure I gave you a matching pair. I can’t always tell the pink from the yellow.”
