“Usually.”
“Hyperventilating Hobbs!” he exclaimed. “A Librarian! Quickly, lad, we have to go! Get dressed; I’ll go steal some food from your foster parents!”
“Wait!” I said, but the old man had already scrambled from the room, moving with a sudden urgency.
I stood, dumbfounded.
Ms. Fletcher? I thought. Take the inheritance? That’s stupid. Why would she want a silly bag of sand? I shook my head, uncertain what to make of all this. Finally, I just walked over to my dresser. Getting dressed, at least, seemed like a good idea. I threw on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and my favorite green jacket.
As I finished, Grandpa Smedry rushed back into the bedroom, carrying two of Roy’s extra briefcases. I noticed a leaf of lettuce sticking halfway out of one, while the other seemed to be leaking a bit of ketchup.
“Here!” Grandpa Smedry said, handing me the lettuce briefcase. “I packed us lunches. No telling how long it will be before we can stop for food!”
I raised the briefcase, frowning. “You packed lunches inside of briefcases?”
“They’ll look less suspicious that way. We have to fit in! Now, let’s get moving. The Librarians could already be working on the sand.”
“So?” I said.
“So!” the old man exclaimed. “Lad, with those sands, the Librarians could destroy kingdoms, overthrow cultures, dominate the world! We need to get them back. We’ll have to strike quickly, and possibly at great peril to our lives. But that’s the Smedry way!”
I lowered the briefcase. “If you say so.”
“Before we leave, I need to know what our resources are. What’s your Talent, lad?”
I frowned. “Talent?”
“Yes,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Every Smedry has a Talent. What is yours?”
“Uh… playing the oboe?”
“This is no time for jokes, lad!” Grandpa Smedry said. “This is serious! If we don’t get that sand back…”
“Well,” I said, sighing. “I’m pretty good at breaking things.”
Grandpa Smedry froze.
Maybe I shouldn’t play with the old man, I thought, feeling guilty. He may be a loon, but that’s no reason to make fun of him.
“Breaking things?” Grandpa Smedry said, sounding awed. “So it’s true. Why such a Talent hasn’t been seen in centuries….”
“Look,” I said, raising my hands. “I was just joking around. I didn’t mean –“
“I knew it!” Grandpa Smedry said eagerly. “Yes, yes, this improves our chances! Come, lad, we have to get moving.” He turned and left the room again, carrying his briefcase and rushing eagerly down the stairs.
“Wait!” I cried, chasing after the old man. However, when I reached the doorway, I paused.
There was a car parked on the curb outside. An old car. Now, when you read the words old car, you likely think of a beat-up or rusted vehicle that barely runs. A car that is old, kind of in the same way that cassette tapes are old.
This was not such a car. It was not old like cassette tapes are old – it wasn’t even old like records are old. No, this car was old like Beethoven is old. Or, at least, so it seemed. To me – and, likely, to most of you living in the Hushlands – the car looked like an antique. Kind of like a Model-T.
But that was just my assumption.
The point is that many times, the first thing a person presumes about something – or someone – is inaccurate. Or, at the very least, incomplete. Take the young Alcatraz Smedry, for instance. After reading my story up to this point, you have probably made some assumptions. Perhaps you’re – despite my best efforts – feeling a bit of sympathy for me. After all, orphans usually make very sympathetic heroes.
Perhaps you think that my habit of using sarcasm is simply a method of hiding my insecurity. Perhaps you’ve decided that I wasn’t a cruel boy, just a very confused one. Perhaps you’ve decided, despite my feigned indifference, I didn’t like breaking things.
Obviously, you are a person of very poor judgment. I would ask you to kindly refrain from drawing conclusions that I don’t explicitly tell you to make. That’s a very bad habit, and it makes authors grumpy.
I was none of those things. I was simply a mean boy who didn’t really care whether or not he burned down kitchens. And that mean boy was the one who stood on the doorstep, watching Grandpa Smedry waving eagerly for him to follow.
Now, perhaps I’ll admit that I felt just a little bit of longing. A… wishfulness, you might say. Getting a package that claimed to be from my parents had made me remember days long ago – before I realized how foolish I was being – when I had yearned to know my real parents. Days when I had longed to find someone who had to love me, if only because they were related to me.
Fortunately, I had outgrown those feelings. My moment of weakness passed quickly, and I slammed the door closed and locked the old man outside. Then I went to the kitchen to get some breakfast.
That, however, is when someone drew a gun on me.
Chapter 3
I’d like to take this opportunity to point out something important. Should a strange old man of questionable sanity show up at your door – suggesting that he is your grandfather and that you should accompany him upon some quest of mystical import – you should flatly refuse him.
Don’t take his candy either.
Unfortunately, as you will soon see, I was quickly forced to break this rule. Please don’t hold it against me. It was done under duress. I’m really not used to being shot at.
I walked tiredly into the kitchen – which still smelled of smoke – hoping that the strange old man wouldn’t take to pounding on the door. I didn’t really want to call the police on him – not only would I likely break the telephone in the process (I’m particularly bad with phones) but I really didn’t want the old loon carted away in a police car. That would have been –
“Alcatraz Smedry?” a voice suddenly asked.
I jumped, turning from the half-burned cupboard, a box of cornflakes in my hand. A man stood in the doorway behind me, wearing slacks and a button-down shirt. I frowned, realizing that I recognized the symbol on the man’s shirt pocket and standard-issue attaché case. He was a foster care caseworker – this was the man that Ms. Fletcher had sent to pick me up from the house. I realized that when I’d originally gone chasing the old man up to my room, I’d left the front door open. The caseworker must have come in looking for me while I was upstairs chatting with the lunatic.
“Hi,” I said, putting down the box. “I’ll be ready in a bit – let me have breakfast first.”
“You’re him, then?” the caseworker asked, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses. “The Smedry kid?”
I nodded.
“Good,” the man said, then pulled a gun out of his attaché case and raised it toward me. It had a silencer on the barrel.
I froze, shocked. (And don’t try to claim that you did anything different the first time a government bureaucrat pulled a gun on you.)
Fortunately, I eventually found my tongue. “Wait!” I said, raising my hands. “What are you doing?”
“Thanks for the sands, kid,” the man said, and moved as if to pull the trigger.
At that moment something massive crashed through the wall of my house – something that looked a lot like the front end of an old Model-T Ford. I cried out, dodging to the side, and the caseworker stumbled to the ground in the chaos.
The man who called himself Grandpa Smedry sat happily in the driver’s seat. A chunk of smoke-damaged ceiling fell down onto the hood of the car, throwing up a puff of white dust. The old man poked his head out the window.
“Lad,” he said, “might I point out that you have two choices right now? You can get in the car with me, or you can stay here with the man holding a gun.”
I stood, dazed.
“You really don’t have much time to decide,” Grandpa Smedry said, leaning toward me, speaking in a kind of half whisper, as if he were sharing some kind of great secret.
Now, I’d like to pause here and note that Grandpa Smedry was lying to me. I didn’t have only two choices at that point – I had quite a few more than that. True, I could have chosen to stay in the room and get shot. I also could have chosen to get in the car. However, there were lots of other things I could have done. For instance, I could have run around the house flapping my arms and pretending that I was a penguin. The logical choice to make in this situation would have been to call the police on both of those maniacs.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think of penguins or police and instead did as Grandpa Smedry said, scrambling over and getting into the car.
As I stated at the beginning of the chapter, I really shouldn’t have done this. I was soon to learn the dangers involved in following strange old men on quests. I don’t want to give away any more of the story, but let me say that my fate at this point took a sharp turn toward altars, sacrifices, and evil Librarians.
And possible some sharks.
The car backed out of the house, the tires leaving tracks in the lawn. I sat in the front passenger seat, still stunned, looking at the wreckage of the Sheldons’ house. Bits of siding were falling off the outside wall, crushing Roy’s prize tulips. This was more damage than I’d ever done to any foster home. This time it wasn’t directly my fault, but… well, that didn’t change the fact that the kitchen was no longer just burned but also had quite a large hole in it.
We turned onto the street in front of the house – the car puttering along at a modest speed. The caseworker didn’t chase after us, but that didn’t stop me from watching anxiously until the house disappeared in the distance.
Someone just tried to kill me, I thought, feeling numb. You may find it hard to believe – considering the number of things I’d broken in my life – but this was the first time someone had actually tried to shoot me. It was an unsettling feeling. A little like the way you feel when you have the flu, actually. Maybe there’s a connection.
“Well, that was exciting!” Grandpa Smedry said.
I was still staring out the window. The street passed outside, a suburban neighborhood distinctive only in that it looked pretty much like every other one in the nation. Calm two-story houses. Green lawns. Oak trees, shrubs, flower beds, all carefully maintained.
“He tried to kill me,” I whispered.
Grandpa Smedry snorted. “Not very well. You’ll understand eventually, lad, but pulling a gun on a Smedry isn’t exactly the smartest thing a man can do. But that’s behind us. Now we have to decide what to do next.”
“Next?”
“Of course. We can’t just let them have those sands!” Grandpa Smedry raised a hand and pointed at me. “Don’t you understand, lad? It’s not just your life that’s in danger here. This is the fate of an entire world we’re juggling! The Free Kingdoms are already losing their war against the Librarians. With a tool like the Sands of Rashid, the Librarians will have just the edge they need to win. If we don’t get the sands back before they’re smelted – which will only take a few hours – it could lead to the overthrow of the Free Kingdoms themselves! We are civilization’s only hope.”