Speed Read online

  PRAISE FOR JUMP CUT

  FROM SEVEN (THE SERIES)

  “Readers will thoroughly enjoy Jump Cut on its own or as part of this unique new series.

  Highly Recommended.” —CM Magazine

  “[An] entertaining story with a heart of gold.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The dialogue is very amusing, sharp and revealing of character…” —Resource Links

  PRAISE FOR CODA

  FROM THE SEVEN SEQUELS

  “This clever spy adventure features a likable hero and bursts with enough film references to satisfy all but the most hard-core movie buffs.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A fun read with interesting characters and a quirky plotline.” —CM Magazine

  “A good choice for anyone who likes mystery and action books.” —Canadian Teacher Magazine

  SPEED

  TED STAUNTON

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2016 Ted Staunton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Staunton, Ted, 1956–, author

  Speed / Ted Staunton.

  (The seven prequels)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1161-4 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1162-1 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1163-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8587.T334S7 2016 jC813'.54 C2016-900489-9

  C2016-900490-2

  First published in the United States, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933643

  Summary: In this middle-grade novel, Spencer ends up in the middle of a War of 1812 reenactment.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by iStock.com

  Author photo by Margaret Heenan

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  19 18 17 16 • 4 3 2 1

  In loving memory of my mom, who made me wear shorts

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  When I rule the world my first law will be that skinny—I mean, slim—guys like me never have to wear dumb giant cargo shorts, even if their parents tell them to. My second law will be that we can take our cell phones anywhere.

  See, if my parents, Deb and Jer, had just let me bring my new phone on this trip, I wouldn’t have had to hide it in these stupid monster shorts to sneak it along. And if they had let me wear regular jeans with regular pockets, I would have known right away that it was gone when I lost it. So it’s practically not even my fault that it’s gone—except it is.

  I notice my phone is missing right after we finish setting up the tents, one for Grandpa and one for me and my younger brother, Bunny. Grandpa and Bunny are off getting wood for tonight’s campfire. I’m lugging our stuff from Grandpa’s Jeep into the tents when I stop to check my phone battery. I’m worried about power sources out here in the wild. Okay, it’s not the wild. It’s the campground of Queenston Provincial Park, but it might as well be the wild: I hate camping. Anyway, I go to check my phone and it’s not there.

  Oh. No. My phone is brand new. I do a total speed search everywhere: shorts, tents, the Jeep. Nothing. I do it all again. Still nothing. I say a whole bunch of words I’m not supposed to know. They don’t help. Panting, I duck into Grandpa’s tent and look again. All I see is a book crammed in the top of Grandpa’s pack: Billion-Dollar Brain. It’s not about me, that’s for sure. As I fight my panic, I hear Bun and Grandpa coming back. Oh no, no, no. I run out, grab sleeping bags and foam pads and pitch them into the tents. Behind me I hear the clatter of falling wood. I turn, trying to look like a happy camper. I’m sweating, and it’s not even very hot.

  “Good going, Bernard.” Grandpa always calls Bunny by his real name. He unzips his RCAF shell, pushes up his fishing hat and wipes his forehead. Usually he wears a beret, but maybe a beret’s not summer camp enough. “Tents shipshape, Spencer?”

  “Almost.”

  Grandpa nods. “Okay, men, here’s the plan. We’ll walk the boundaries of where you can roam solo, then I’ll have a little lie-down, and then we’ll hunt up some excitement.” Grandpa checks his big flier’s watch. “Excellent, it’s just one thirty. C’mon with me. Now, pay attention, boys. I’m going to trust you both and I want you to have fun, but this is not a normal weekend at the park. There’ll be surprises.”

  “Surprises like a birthday party?” Bun asks.

  I don’t hear the answer. Losing my phone is surprise enough for me. As Grandpa leads us across the campground I whisper to Bunny, “There’s a problem.”

  “What about?” he whispers back.

  “I lost my phone. Where did you last see it?”

  “In your hand.”

  “But where was that?”

  “Right there.” Bun points. At my hand.

  “I know where my hand is, Bun Man. But where was I when you saw my phone?”

  He thinks about this as Grandpa points out how far we can go. “Ice cream,” Bunny says.

  “We just had some, Bernard,” Grandpa says over his shoulder.

  I feel a cool scoop of hope. They’re both right: we stopped at an ice-cream place just outside the park gates. I remember getting out my phone when Grandpa hit the washroom. Bun and I were sitting at a picnic table and I shoved the phone under my leg when Grandpa came back sooner than I expected. Then Bun and I went to the Jeep while he got extra napkins for the cones.

  Now Grandpa is saying, “True gen, boys: watch for poison ivy. The old P.I. will get you every time, and the woods will be full of it.”

  Another reason not to wear dumb shorts, I think. Grandpa’s not wearing shorts. He calls his tan pants chinos. Whatever. I’m not going there again now. There’s something else I have to do. As Grandpa ducks into his tent for a snooze I grab Bunny. “I’m going back to get my phone. I’ll be fast. If Grandpa wakes up, don’t tell him, okay? Tell him I’ve gone exploring. He’ll like that. See you later, Bun Man.” I take off for the road we came in on.

  TWO

  The gates are farther away than I thought. It doesn’t matter. Remembering how I argued with Deb and Jer about bringing my phone keeps me going.

  Jer had said, If you lost it in the woods, you’d never find it. Then Deb said, Remember the rule? Lose it and you’re not getting another. That thing cost a fortune. You don’t need a phone in a campground.

  Oh yes you do. The only thing more boring than camping is TV golf. I need the games on my phone to survive. Games are the most important part of a good phone, except for a place to charge it, which I will find somewhere
in this stupid park after I get my phone. I didn’t say that though, because Grandpa had chimed in with Camping is about escaping cell phones, Spencer.

  But what if there’s an emergency?

  That’s what grandpas are for. I’ll have mine in the Jeep. Turned off.

  Case closed, said Deb.

  Well, this is one emergency Grandpa can’t deal with. What makes it worse is, I was really, truly, only going to play games at bedtime or when Grandpa was napping—for a reward, like. I figured I’d deserve it.

  See, Jer had given me a pep talk. This trip means a lot to your Grandpa D. He wants to take each of his grandsons somewhere, bond with you. Bernie would love to do the same thing. Bernie is Jer’s dad, my other grandpa. He and Estelle live out west on Salt Spring Island. Grandpa D is Deb’s dad, David McLean. It’s just a weekend, Jer went on. Promise to try to be a happy camper, okay? Just go with the flow, give it a chance, and I bet you’ll have fun. And Grandpa D will love it. He’ll be proud of you.

  That’s true. Grandpa knows I suck at outdoors stuff, and I know that bugs him. Luckily, when we go to his cottage, Bun and our cousins take up the slack for me while I read comics under the deck. I take up the slack for Bun when Grandpa starts giving us advice. Deb calls that Grandpa’s lecture mode. She should know—she’s a prof at York U, and if that’s what university is like, I think I’ll skip it.

  I puff up to the SofteeSlurp ice-cream stand, my glasses smeared with sweat. There’s no phone where we sat. A teenager is bagging trash and wiping tables. I hurry over. “Did anyone turn in a phone?”

  He shakes his head. “No, but I saw some dude pick one up from over there, maybe an hour ago.” He points to the table we were at.

  How long ago were we here? If I had my phone, I’d know. “Was the phone yellow?” I ask. He shrugs. His SofteeSlurp shirt has a rainbow of stains. Maybe he doesn’t notice colors. I try again. “What did he look like?”

  He shrugs again. “Tall. He had a blue coat and a weird hat. The hat’s why I remember. Light pants, maybe white.”

  Maybe he does notice colors. “Did you see where he went?”

  “Probably into the park.” He hefts a trash bag and walks away.

  I am mega-doomed. I head back into the park myself, kicking at gravel on the road. Somewhere in here is a tall guy in a blue jacket, a funny hat and white pants who stole my phone. How am I going to find him? What will I do if I do find him? Maybe Bun and I could team up. I imagine Bun karate-kicking him into a batch of poison ivy while I swoop down from the trees to catch my phone as it goes sailing out of the guy’s greedy, hairy hand. I wish. It ain’t gonna happen, as Jer would say.

  Instead, what if, when we get home, I just say I left it in the living room? I could even ask where it is. How could it be my fault if no one can find it? Bun wouldn’t rat me out.

  Problem is, I’m a bad liar. Deb, especially, can tell. A teacher’s heard a million excuses, she always says to me if I try something. Besides, even if I got away with it, having a guilty secret might be worse than having Deb and Jer go hyperballistic for a week, say, and then getting over it. And either way, I’d never get a phone again.

  I’m still thinking this over when I hear strange thumping noises. I look up and find I’ve got a new problem—I don’t know where I am. Have I taken a wrong turn? This is not what I need right now. The thumping is coming from behind a line of trees I don’t remember. Something’s moving back there. I shove my glasses up and jog over. A voice barks something. I hear clattering and scraping and then I’m peering through the leaves at a line of men holding rifles. They’re all pointed at me.

  “Fire!” There’s a rolling clap of thunder, and the world rips in half. Dragon flames belch from the rifle barrels. I think I yell as I jump back, and then I’m down. A gray-white cloud swallows me, and the world goes silent. I’m wrapped in cotton; I don’t even feel my wounds. Is this what dying is like? If it is, dying smells like the firecrackers Grandpa has for us at the cottage on the long weekend. Then the men with guns burst soundlessly through the cloud, mouths open, stabbing the air in front of them with bayonets as they run past me. I tuck into a ball and feel their boots thud past.

  The ground stops shaking. I open my eyes. I can see—my glasses have made it to heaven with me. If that’s where I am. What I’m seeing through the cloud is my feet, lying on a thick electrical cable snaking along the ground, inches from a patch of poison ivy. I wiggle my toes. They work. So do my fingers. I pat my body for bullet holes. I don’t feel any. There’s no blood on my hands either. Maybe I’m alive. I sit up. Now my ears are ringing, and I hear a voice, faintly, from somewhere past the smoke, which is drifting away. I look up. Back where the men fired their rifles at me three people are standing. Grandpa would call them kids, but they’re way older than me, and I’m finishing grade seven. They’re university age maybe. They’ve got some kind of camera and some other equipment. One of them is waving this way.

  I look behind me. The men have stopped running, just past the trees. They’re taking the bayonets off their rifles and beginning to stroll back. One is lighting a cigarette. A couple more are checking their cell phones. I see now they’re all in old-fashioned soldier uniforms that I recognize from school. The War of 1812. And guess what? Their uniforms are white pants, blue coats and tall funny hats.

  THREE

  The ringing in my ears is pretty much gone by the time the soldiers get to me. I’m standing up, trying to look as if I should be here.

  “That go okay?” one of them asks me. He’s carrying a sword instead of a rifle.

  “Oh. Yeah. Great.”

  “You could hear my orders?”

  “I sure heard the ‘fire’ part.” I nod. I hate it when I don’t know what’s going on.

  “Good. Listen,” says the man, “will you take this back for me? I’ve really gotta hit the can, and I sure won’t need it there.” He chuckles as he unclips a little microphone from the standup collar of his blue coat and fishes out a wire and battery pack. “A good charge always does this to me.” He hands me the stuff. “Thanks.”

  “But—” I start to say. The man is already trotting away, hanging on to his sword. Other guys in blue coats are almost at the camera. I hustle after them, wishing Bun was here. Whatever’s going on, if one of them has my phone, I don’t want to lose him too.

  The three people at the camera, two guys and a girl, are packing equipment into a little metal suitcase. I hand the baby microphone and battery pack to one of them. “Cool,” he says without looking up. He checks a switch on the battery and stows it in a foam-lined box. “Grab the other two from those guys.” A couple more 1812 soldiers are standing nearby, taking off their microphones. They’ve put their rifles and tall black hats on the ground. I walk over, and that’s when I stop breathing for real. On top of one guy’s hat is my cell phone. I mean, I think it’s my phone. It looks exactly like it, and this soldier is in the right clothes. It has to be my cell phone. I think.

  How can I find out? Hey, did you steal that phone? will probably not work. Should I just grab the phone and take off? Um, no. I’m a slow runner, and this guy has a gun and a bayonet. Bunny could probably do it, but not me. Besides, what if it’s not my phone? Grandpa, Deb and Jer are going to be even madder if I lose my phone and go to jail for stealing someone else’s.

  What if I knock over his hat, pick up the phone to help and check the contacts before I give it back? Sure, and maybe I’ll also sprinkle myself with magic fairy dust to be invisible. I’m out of time for deciding. I’m asking for the microphones as they unclip their battery packs. I can’t take my eyes off the phone. My phone. Maybe. “Nice phone,” I hear myself say. Maybe I can ask to look at it.

  “Thanks,” says the guy, handing me his mic and battery. “Just got it.”

  Just got it. Now the other soldier is handing me his stuff. My hands are full. How can I ask to see the phone now? I ask, “Have you, uh, been to the SofteeSlurp place?”

  The soldier is tugging
at these white belts that cross on his chest. He gives me a sharp look. I freeze. Does he know I know? Then he laughs and points to a pink stain on the belt. “Good noticing. Yeah, don’t get the Cherry Bubble Gum. I’ll have to clean this when we get back to camp. Hope Luther doesn’t see it first. How farb would an ice-cream stain be?”

  The other guy says, “How farb is a cell phone?”

  “Geez! Right.”

  Farb? Farb? They laugh as the first soldier shrugs the belt into place. He stuffs the phone into his pocket before I can do anything.

  “Mics, please!” It’s the guy packing the foam-lined box. I run to hand them in. I have to follow that soldier. As I turn away, the movie guy says, “You with the Yanks?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Good. We’re all going the same way.” He has glasses, like me, and cargo shorts, except he’s chubby so his legs don’t look like twigs. His T-shirt reads NIAGARA COLLEGE, but stretched a little. My T-shirt says ELO and is not stretched at all.

  “Could you carry that?” He nods at a gym bag with electrical cords sticking out.

  “Sure,” I say. This is my first break. Now I can follow the soldier without being noticed.

  “Come on, Mark,” the other movie guy is calling. He’s got the camera. The girl has two backpacks. Mark grabs the metal suitcase and a tripod thing with a long arm attached. We start after the soldiers.

  “What’s next on the sked?” says the other movie guy. He’s got on a ballcap and cool sunglasses.

  The girl says, “The encampment, Basil. Should be lots of good stuff. Battle and cow tomorrow, then linking shots. Too bad Stef can’t be here this aft. The light’s so good.”

  “She’s gotta work,” Basil says. “She’ll be here tonight.”

  “I know,” the girl says. “Just saying.” She’s tall and pale. Her hair is short and dark. She looks at me. “Hi, I’m Tracey. Are you a new helper? Who are you with?”