doesn’t even give us enough money to get home again if he tries to kill us or something! As soon as we get to the next stop I’m going to call her to come get us.”
Tyler laughed, but he wasn’t happy. “Then you better work on your Star Wars trivia, because she’ll take us straight to the Peirhos’ house. Martin and Anthony are going to spend all summer quizzing you about what kind of underpants Boba Fett wears.”
Lucinda shuddered. People always said she was too negative-her teachers even asked her why she never tried to see the good side of things-but this was proof, right here, that no matter how bad you thought things were going to be, they turned out even worse.
For once, Tyler was right. Arguing wouldn’t help. There was no escape. “Well,” she said, “I guess being killed by an exploding cow fireball will be less horrible than having to watch the Peirho twins and their battling action figures.”
Tyler laughed. Lucinda almost felt better. Then something brushed her window again, and this time she looked up just in time to see a tiny furry head no bigger than a kiwi fruit looking in at her from the top of the window. For a moment it seemed even more bizarre than it was, its mouth at the top and its eyes at the bottom, until she realized the creature must be hanging upside down on the side of the train like a bat, watching her. She even thought she could see the tip of a leathery wing pressed on the glass. But it wasn’t a bat.
“Tyler-” She stared right at it, certain that if she looked away it would disappear. “Tyler, there’s a monkey on the train.” It disappeared anyway, flipping away like a leaf blown from a car windshield.
“Yeah, and it’s you,” he said, not really paying attention. “Whoa, do you really think we’ll get to see some cows explode? Like in FarmFrag?” He grinned, then put in his earbuds and said, way too loud, “ Maybe it will be an okay summer after all. I’ve never seen a real cow blow up! ”
The monkey face was gone from her window, but now everyone else in the compartment was staring at Lucinda and her brother. She shrank down in her seat and held the strange book in front of her face. Had she only imagined what she’d seen? Because outside of movies she was pretty darn sure there weren’t any such things as flying monkeys.
Of course, there weren’t any such things as fire-breathing cows, either. Lucinda tried to focus on the words on the page, but that wasn’t working. She couldn’t help wondering whether the summer ahead was going to be as boring as she’d first thought, terrifyingly weird, or somehow both at the same time.
Chapter 3
T he station sign for their stop was old and beat-up, missing a couple letters. WELCOME TO TANDARD ALLEY.
Tyler wiped sweat off his forehead, then pulled his baseball cap back down over his messy brown hair. It had been so hot on the train that he had drunk three whole soft drinks, but it was even hotter here.
Now that the train had gone, the platform was empty. Tyler felt like the two of them were the only people in the whole tiny town.
“So where’s Uncle Gideon?” said Lucinda. They wandered through the empty station and looked out into the empty narrow street that ran in front of it. A few houses were in view but nobody seemed to be outside-not that Tyler blamed them. “Or are we supposed to walk to his crazy farm and die in the heat?” Lucinda continued.
“Someone’s going to meet us,” Tyler said, looking around. The station had nothing more than a ticket booth and a couple of vending machines, but it was cooler than the platform. “That’s what Mom said, anyway.”
“Like she was even paying attention.” Lucinda pushed damp hair out of her eyes. “All she wanted was to go off to her singles thing.”
Tyler just shrugged. A lot of what Lucinda complained about was true, but what could you do about it? Life was rotten if you were a kid. Grown-ups just did what they wanted, then said it was for your own good. You could go nuts worrying about it or you could concentrate on something more interesting. He reached into his pocket for his GameBoss, then stopped.
He had been hearing the strange sound for a few moments, a clop-clop-clopping that reminded him of something on television. Westerns, old Westerns, the kind his father forced him to watch on their weekend visits, thinking that Tyler liked them too. He didn’t, but there was no purpose in saying anything, because if he said he didn’t want to watch the movies Dad would just take him to the park or something, and stand around smoking and watching Tyler pretend to play on the jungle gym like he was still a little kid. Worse, they might go out to have a meal and Dad would pretend to be really interested in who Tyler’s friends were and make him answer questions about what he was learning in school.
As if.
Clop, clop, clop.
“There’s a horse out there,” Tyler said.
“What?” Lucinda was looking around furiously as if Uncle Gideon, the flaming-cow man, was suddenly going to appear in the middle of the tiny station.
“A horse. Out there in the street, I guess. I can hear a horse.”
“You’re crazy.” But she followed him out to the little street outside and its few rundown houses with their fences leaning every way but straight up and down.
There was indeed a horse-a big brown horse, standing in the street outside the station, and it was attached to some kind of huge wagon piled high with sacks. A very strange-looking man sat on a bench at the front of the wagon, holding the horse’s reins and looking out at them from under the brim of an ancient straw hat. He had very tanned skin, a thin, hooked nose, and a puff of gray beard on his chin. His eyes were mostly hidden in the shade of his wide-brimmed hat.
“You are Tyler and Lucinda?” His accent made the words bump in the wrong places, like someone pretending to be a funny foreigner on television. “Get up on the cart, please.”
“Are you… are you Uncle Gideon?” Tyler asked at last.
The man shook his head slowly. “No, no. Not me. I am Mr. Walkwell. I work for him.” He climbed down and tossed the kids’ heavy suitcases into the wagon and onto the sacks piled there as if they were pillows. Tyler couldn’t help noticing that this Mr. Walkwell guy had very small feet. He wore little old-fashioned boots that laced up and looked like they should belong to a child, not a tall man. He also walked with an awkward two-footed limp, as though he were treading barefoot over broken glass. Just to make things stranger still, his boots made a weird crunching noise with each step. Tyler looked at Lucinda. She looked back. “Somebody has the wrong name,” she whispered.
Mr. Walkwell swung himself back up onto the seat and gave them a sour look, as though he knew what they were thinking. “Get in.” He had strange eyes, too, very red around the edges, as though he had been swimming. Also, the centers seemed more yellow than brown.
“Do we sit on the bench next to you?” Tyler asked.
“Better, I think, than if you sit on top of the feed bags,” said Mr. Walkwell, his voice dry as the air. “They slide.”
Tyler clambered up. Halfway he began to lose his balance, but the bearded man reached down and wrapped his thin, strong brown fingers around Tyler’s wrist and lifted him up to the seat as easily as if Tyler was a loaf of bread. When Lucinda had climbed up too, Mr. Walkwell clucked once to the horse and the cart moved off. That was the last sound the man made until they were well outside of town.
Not only was this guy talkative and charming, Tyler thought, he smelled too. It wasn’t a rancid smell, though, just… strong. He smelled like sweat and dry grass and… and animals, Tyler decided, among other things. Well, that made sense for someone who worked on a farm, didn’t it?
After something like a quarter-hour of rolling slowly along past yellow fields, they turned off the main road onto a wide dirt track. This new road wound up through golden hills spotted with trees until the last bends disappeared in rocky high ground that kept rising beyond them.
“Where’s the farm?” he asked.
