The Impossible Race: Cragbridge Hall, Volume 3 Read online

  Cragbridge Hall, Volume 3: The Impossible Race

  Chad Morris

  © 2015 Chad Morris, Brandon Dorman.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  Illustrations © 2015 Brandon Dorman

  Visit us at ShadowMountain.com

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Chad, author.

  The impossible race / Chad Morris.

  pages cm. — (Cragbridge Hall ; book 3)

  Summary: Derick and Abby Cragbridge continue their seventh-grade year at Cragbridge Hall, where they run into competitions, new friends, virtual zombies, and real danger.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-60907-979-6 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  [1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Boarding schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Twins—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 6. Grandfathers—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series: Morris, Chad. Cragbridge Hall ; book 3.

  PZ7.M827248Im 2015

  [Fic]—dc232014036845

  Printed in the United States of America

  R. R. Donnelley, Crawfordsville, IN

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover illustration © Brandon Dorman

  Art direction by Richard Erickson

  Cover design by Sheryl Dickert Smith

  Other Books in the Cragbridge Hall Series

  Book 1: The Inventor’s Secret

  Book 2: The Avatar Battle

  To Kirtlan.

  One day you’ll be a published authorand I’ll be thrilled to read your stories.

  Table of Contents

  The Backup Plan

  Are You Sure?

  The Ash

  Whoa. Mind Blown.

  The Cane

  The Announcement

  Decision

  Stoop

  Better than Brilliance

  Anjum

  Suspects

  The Big Opening

  Oscars and Ancient Argentina

  Less than a Second

  In the Dark

  One-Inch Spies

  Flames

  The Gallows

  Going Mythical

  Inside the Labyrinth

  The Minotaur

  The Final Blow

  A Thief in the Darkness

  Jenkins

  Walled In

  The Antidote

  Criminals

  The Future

  March 29

  Sandstorm

  Acid

  Fire

  Me? Or Me?

  Pounding

  Tracked

  Attack

  Explosions

  Don’t You Dare Apologize

  Light

  The Last Secret

  Fifteen Minutes Ago

  Returning the Favor

  The End of the Year

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions

  Recommended Reading

  About the Author

  The Backup Plan

  With a flick of his finger, the mercenary’s gun barrel emerged from his tan sleeve and aligned with his index finger. He pointed it at a woman tied and gagged in the corner of a small, cinder-block house. She shifted on the dirt ground, trying to get comfortable. Beneath her blindfold, she couldn’t see the gun. “Nao quero esperar mais,” the mercenary said.

  The hostage froze.

  A short man with a paunchy stomach and a patchy beard stood up and waved his hands to stop the gunman.

  Abby triggered her translator. It’s hard to spy when you can’t understand what the people are saying. She and her friends had been ready to intervene if the bearded man hadn’t stopped the gunman, but as long as they stayed calm, she wanted to see if she could get any valuable information. Her translator recognized Portuguese and changed it to English through the small speaker in her ear.

  “Put that away,” the man with the patchy beard commanded.

  “I’m tired of waiting,” the gunman in the tan shirt replied, sending his barrel back into his sleeve. He opened the door to the small house, and light flooded in. Abby had to blink several times to get used to it. The man peered out at a dirt trail. It didn’t look like anyone else lived within miles. “Shouldn’t Muns have told us whether to kill her or let her go by now?”

  “All I know,” a third mercenary said, sitting at a bare table on the other side of the room, his cigarette bouncing in his lips with every word, “is that if you shot her before Muns said you could, you’d find yourself a hostage in a small shack somewhere.” The man gestured to the house around him. “Probably something like this. And you’d likely be guarded by someone with little patience and an itchy trigger finger just like you.”

  “It also means we wouldn’t get paid,” the man with the patchy beard added. “I like getting paid. So if we don’t, I might volunteer to be the guy with the itchy trigger finger.”

  The man in the tan shirt glared back at his partners in crime, trying to decide whether or not he believed them.

  Abby whispered to Carol, “Part of me can’t believe Muns would stoop this low, but part of me isn’t surprised.” They watched the scene as if they were in the same room, but they stood somewhere else entirely—somewhere on the other side of the world. Abby and Carol were watching from the secret basement of Cragbridge Hall, the most prestigious secondary school in the world. One half of the gym-sized basement was dimly lit with a cold, hard stone floor, but the other side showed the small hut in Brazil. They could watch the mercenaries on the other side of the world because of an invention that stood in the center of the room—the Bridge. Its metal console was mounted to the floor. What looked like silver branches jutted out from it, sprawling up into the ceiling. Entering their special keys and a sphere in the console of the Bridge allowed them to see anything in the past or the present. And whatever they watched filled the other half of the large room. What they were watching was the present. The image was faded like a ghost of what was really happening, but the woman who was gagged and blindfolded was going through the horror now.

  “I know,” Carol agreed. “The fact that Muns would have these guys kidnap her so he could blackmail her sister is terrible. Muns is so creepy evil. He gives me shivers and goose bumps and the heebie-jeebies all at the same time.” She shuddered, her blonde ponytail shaking. “The heebieshivergoosbies,” she said. “Or the bumpaheebieshivegoos. They should put both of those words in the dictionary and put Muns’s face by them.”

  Abby might have laughed if she wasn’t so upset about what she was seeing. “I say it’s time we fix this. We need the other two spheres.” To be able to travel into the past, they needed three keys inserted and turned simultaneously in the console on the Bridge. Those three keys were already in place and turned. A mechanical arm had also grasped a special sphere and pulled it inside the Bridge. The sphere allowed them to see the present. But if they wanted to travel into the present—to cross into somewhere else on Earth in that very moment, they needed two more spheres. It was all designed so that no one person could manipulate time by him- or herself. He or she would have to counsel with and use the help of another person. Carol handed Abby two more spheres, and Abby placed them over two of the keys. Robotic arms emerged from the control panel of the Bridge just above the key
s and grabbed the spheres.

  The Bridge trembled. “We have to hurry,” Abby said. “We probably have less than a minute.” Using the Bridge to see the present put a lot of pressure on the impressive invention. If used in the present for too long, it would shake itself into shambles.

  The image of the hostage changed from being a faded ghost of the faraway scene to vivid and clear. Humidity flooded into the Cragbridge Hall basement, making it feel like there was a pool nearby. The smell of dirt and the stench of the neglected home also wafted in, mixed with the smell of the mercenaries’ and the hostage’s sweat.

  Abby and Carol could now cross from the basement of Cragbridge Hall into Brazil, but it would be nearly impossible for them to help the hostage by themselves. Though they would definitely surprise the mercenaries, two unarmed seventh-grade girls would probably not fare well against several trained men with guns. It was a good thing Abby and Carol were not alone in the basement of Cragbridge Hall. Two other fantastic inventions of the school were with them.

  Abby looked over her shoulder. “That’s your cue.” In response, a gorilla grunted and an alligator chomped his large jaws. Every bit of the animals, from their fur and scales to their eyes and teeth, looked completely natural, but the two creatures were actually elaborate robots. Abby’s twin brother, Derick, controlled the alligator. His real body was wearing a high-tech suit in a booth in the avatar lab of the school. Rafa, the Brazilian avatar prodigy, controlled the gorilla from the same lab.

  The robot alligator crawled across the basement of the school and crossed into Brazil.

  Abby couldn’t suppress a smile as she saw the mercenaries’ eyes pop wide and their mouths drop open. For them, it was like gaping jaws and razor teeth had simply appeared out of the cinder-block wall—an eight-foot alligator had come out of nowhere.

  The mercenary at the table fell back, crashing to the ground and shouting in horror. The gator lunged and toppled the man in the tan shirt as he was trying to trigger his guns.

  Rafa’s gorilla bounded in. Within seconds, he had ripped the guns from the wrists of the man with the patchy beard and thrown him across the room on top of the man who had fallen by the table.

  The Bridge shook harder.

  “Fast!” Abby yelled across the room—and into a different country.

  The gator snapped at the man in the tan shirt as he scrambled backward, screaming something about a magic alligator coming out of the wall and not wanting to die.

  The gorilla jumped forward several feet, hefted the gagged and blindfolded hostage over its shoulder, and crossed back into the basement of Cragbridge Hall. The gator left off chasing the man in the tan shirt and followed suit, creeping madly across the floor. To the mercenaries, it must have looked like they had disappeared through the wall.

  As Abby closed the connection, she heard one man scream, “What just happened?” And if Abby wasn’t mistaken, another of the mercenaries—a full-grown man—was crying. The scene in Brazil faded away.

  “That’s what you get for kidnapping people!” Carol yelled back, a little too late.

  Abby approached the hostage. “It’s going to be okay.” She touched her lightly on the shoulder. “We’ll take you back home.”

  The Bridge stopped shaking and began to settle, calm. The group would have to wait at least three minutes before they could use it again to put a very confused and blindfolded woman back in her own living room. For now, they had to let it rest.

  • • •

  “You rocked,” Carol said and slapped Derick’s hand. He was no longer controlling the robot alligator from the avatar lab. He, Carol, and Abby all stood in an empty classroom. Just one bank of lights illuminated the rows of desks. The blinds on the windows were all closed. They didn’t have to worry about the students of Cragbridge Hall looking in—they were all asleep in their dorms. They didn’t want any security officers or robots watching. They all had clearance to be at the school in the middle of the night, but didn’t want to arouse any unnecessary suspicion. “You’re cute as a human,” Carol said to Derick, “but I have to admit it’s cooler to high-five you when you’re an alligator.”

  “It might have been cooler,” Derick said, scratching his head through his dark brown hair. It messed up his hair a little, though it still fell in a trendy tousle. “But it was really awkward for me.” He sat down on one of the desks. “Alligators have a different center of balance than us and tiny little arms. They aren’t exactly built for high-fiving.”

  “Awkward, nothing,” Carol said, throwing her arms around as she spoke. Abby often wondered if Carol could speak without moving her arms and hands. It was like her mouth and her limbs were connected. “For the rest of my life I will be able to say that I high-fived a robot alligator and a robot gorilla that saved hostages from mercenaries in Brazil.” She clenched her fist and cocked her elbow. It was a tough-guy move, and coming from a skinny blonde girl, it looked a little out of place. “How many people can say that?”

  “Not many,” Abby admitted, her shoulders bouncing as she laughed. She loved having Carol around. When Abby had first arrived at the premier secondary school in the world, Carol had been the only girl willing to be her friend. She would always love her for that. But Carol’s ability to lighten up even the tensest of circumstances was often just what Abby needed. “Don’t forget that you have to keep this whole thing a secret.”

  “I said I’ll be able to say it,” Carol clarified. “I didn’t say that I would. I wish that you would have let me jump in through the Bridge at the very end so I could say something like, ‘If you ever kidnap innocent people again, you can fully expect ferocious animals to appear out of nowhere and bite your evil backsides.’” She took a few steps backward. “And then I would have stepped back through the Bridge all mysterious and awesome. It would have been the best threatening speech ever!”

  “Yeah,” Derick responded, “Something tells me after the alligator and gorilla, a thirteen-year-old girl just wouldn’t be as scary.”

  This time, several strands of Abby’s sandy blonde hair fell over her face as she tried to choke down her giggles. She pulled them back behind her ear.

  “And did you say ‘evil backsides’?” Derick asked.

  Abby wanted to say something funny to add to the banter, but she couldn’t think of anything. It would come to her later, when it was useless. “I’m just glad we got all of the hostages back home,” Abby said. “They’ll be able to recover as a family.”

  It had been quite the operation. They had used the Bridge to look into the past and find the moment in time each of the various hostages had been kidnapped. Then they had followed the kidnappers to their hideouts, and then found them in the present. When the moment was right, they had sent the avatars across the Bridge to rescue the hostages. Rafa’s mother was perhaps the only one at Cragbridge Hall better at the avatars than Rafa, but she hadn’t trusted herself to do it. She was so angry about the situation that she was afraid she might get carried away. Instead, she had synced up with the Brazilian police to convince them to protect the rescued hostages from any future attacks.

  “After this, I think we should celebrate our heroic rescues with some milkshakes,” Carol proposed. “Maybe they leave the ice cream machine on at night. There’s always strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, but today’s bonus flavor was eggnog. And since saving kidnapped people burns a few calories, I think we all deserve one.”

  “For once, I agree with Carol,” Derick said. “But it might not be worth the risk with all the security around.”

  “Ice cream is always worth the risk,” Carol replied.

  Abby cracked the door and peered out. “Here they come.” They had been waiting in this particular classroom for a reason: to interrogate someone.

  A few moments later, Rafa’s mother entered. She was a few inches taller than Abby and Derick, with olive skin and black hair that hung just above her shoulders. A gorilla was only a step behind, carrying a woman over its shoulder. The woman ha
d dark, curly hair and was bound, gagged, and blindfolded like those they had just rescued. Unlike them, however, she was far from innocent. Just the sight of her made Abby clench her teeth. The gorilla set her down in a chair attached to the floor at the front of the room and pulled off her gag.

  “I know where I am,” the woman said, her hair falling over her blindfold. “We could have talked while I was in my cell. But instead, you brought me out of the basement and up to the school in the middle of the night.” She paused, perhaps waiting for a reaction. She didn’t get one. “I’m not sitting in just any chair. I’m sitting on Oscar Cragbridge’s invention in an English class in Cragbridge Hall.” She turned her head toward where she guessed those who were watching her were standing. “You can see my thoughts as we talk.”