Creatch Battler Read online

  And what's with the confetti? Why would people in the Philippines be treating my parents like heroes?

  Maybe Mom and Dad helped them get rid of some really nasty bugs, and the locals were so happy they decided to celebrate.

  Or maybe this has nothing to do with bugs. Maybe they're just on vacation.

  It was one thing to have parents who were never at home because they were out hunting termites. It was quite another if they were never at home because they were vacationing without him in a foreign country, laughing it up in the middle of some big freaky parade.

  The cold chicken curry tasted awful. He shoveled it into his mouth.

  “Maybe it wasn't them. Maybe it was…a couple of people who…by an amazing coincidence… look exactly like them… and live in the Philippines.”

  The jaw. The big toothy grin. The little mole just to the side of his left nostril. That was his father. He was sure of it.

  “Okay.”

  Billy inhaled.

  He exhaled, slowly. “All right.” He began to address his comments to Piker, as if he were a lawyer and she were in the jury box. “Let's say that was them. They work hard. They needed a vacation, so they went to the Philippines…”

  He was done with the chicken curry. It left a terrible taste in his mouth. He licked the spoon.

  “… and ended up in a parade, um, as the guests of honor. That's not so weird. That probably happens a lot.”

  That has probably never happened in the history of mankind. “Okay. What if…I'm just saying what if, now … what if this isn't a one-time-only deal? What if every time they've told me they were going on a skeeter gig they were… secretly… going to the Philippines? Or even other countries, who knows where?” His stomach tightened as he said the words.

  “What if they have this weird … whole other life … that they haven't been telling me about?” His stomach tightened even more.

  I can't believe they'd pull this stuff on me. It's like they don't even care about me.

  “Look, stay calm. The first thing you need to do is find out what they're up to. Get more info.”

  They couldn't pull something like this off without prepping for it first. There's gotta be stuff lying around here that'll tell me what they're up to.

  He took the stairs three at a time up to his parents' bedroom. Piker was with him every step of the way.

  He surveyed the room. It was just the same as it had always been: the clunky bed with tree trunks for legs that looked as if it had been hauled back from a hunting lodge, the totally mismatched dressers (one cherry, the other unvarnished pine), the messy stacks of pack-rat junk that filled his mother's walk-in closet. He'd seen it all a thousand times before. But now every nook and cranny seemed to be a potential source of incriminating evidence. He went to his mother's bedside table, yanked open the drawer, and rifled through its contents. There were hair bands, nail files, a tube of hand cream… nothing suspicious. He shut the drawer and glanced at the stack of romance novels on top of the table: thick paperbacks with pink-and-purple covers featuring barechested longhaired men kissing women with hair of about the same length.

  “Come on. Mom reads romance novels. She's not the secret vacation type.”

  He picked one up and flipped through the pages. “I don't get it. My parents aren't cool enough to sneak off to the Philippines. And even if they were, it's not like they have loads of cash for this….”

  His eyes zeroed in on the pages of the book. The words were in a foreign language. Well, some of them were. Parts of it were in English.

  He fumbled back to the title page, where, according to the cover, he should find the words Whisper of the Gypsies: A Tale of Forbidden Passion by Deedee Strauss. He found instead:

  Teach Yourself Tagalog!Speak Like a Native Filipino in Less Than Ten Minutes a Day

  He drew the book up to his eyes and took a very close look at the spine. The shiny purple cover had been removed from a romance novel, neatly trimmed, and pasted over the cover of this book, which definitely had nothing to do with Gypsies.

  Billy was starting to feel angry now. His mom and dad had been sneaking around like a couple of secret agents for who knew how long. This was some seriously freaky stuff they were pulling on him.

  Piker whined and rumbled out of the room. Seconds later he heard her paws flailing against the door to the backyard. Normally whenever Piker did this Billy would jump up and run to let her out.

  Not tonight.

  He swept the remaining romance novels off the table with both hands, sat down on his parents' bed, and flipped quickly from one title page to the next:

  So You Want to Speak Swahili?

  There wasn't a single real romance novel in the stack. Billy's throat was now very, very dry, and he felt a headache coming on. He dumped all the books back on the bedside table, making no attempt to put them back the way they'd been.

  It's not just the Philippines. They've been going all over the place: Europe! Africa!

  “This…is unreal.”

  They've been tricking me. Lying to me! They've probably been flying off to another country every other day, all my life.

  He was dumbstruck and angry and scared and hurt all at once. He felt as if the whole world had been ripped away from him and replaced with some weird episode of The Twilight Zone : a landscape that kept shifting and changing every time he turned his head.

  I've gotta stay calm. Gotta deal with this. Just deal with it. He looked around the room. He needed more clues, more pieces of the puzzle. If he gathered enough of them, he could figure out what was going on.

  He spent the next half hour going through his parents' stuff: their drawers, their closets, their clothing, even their toiletries. But he found nothing more unusual than an old denim jacket in his father's closet emblazoned with the words STUD FOR HIRE.

  Ridiculous? Yes.

  An important clue? Man, I hope not.

  He looked under the bed: nothing.

  He rifled through his mother's jewelry case: nothing.

  He even checked behind paintings on the wall for a hidden safe: nothing.

  There's got to be someplace I haven't checked.

  He took one last look around the room, his eyes jumping from object to object, until…

  The trash can!

  Billy dashed to the plastic wastepaper basket on his father's side of the bed, dropped to his knees, and began digging through it.

  He removed an orange rind and tossed it on the floor. Next came an empty box of Kleenex and a folded newspaper (the Piffling Herald, though something covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics wouldn't have entirely surprised him at this point). “I can not believe they've been keeping all this stuff secret from me. Secret travel, secret languages, secret—”

  Receipts.

  Billy was sifting through a handful of them: blue ink on white paper, the scraps that get printed out and stuffed into your hand pretty much anywhere you buy anything. These receipts, though, were not from stores in Piffling. One looked as if it was in Arabic, another in Chinese.

  His heart was really starting to pound like crazy now. Digging deeper, he found a handwritten receipt from a store called the Outpost in Nome, Alaska. The neat cursive words were unmistakable:

  Stapled to this receipt was another, stained with dark brown blotches. Written on it, in a messy ballpoint scrawl, he read:

  Salmon heads? Salmon heads? Two hundred and fifty pounds of them?

  Billy broke into a cold sweat. He flipped back to the first receipt and checked the date.

  No way. This was just last week, when Dad was attending an extermination seminar in Cleveland.

  “Dad wasn't in Cleveland last week. He was in Alaska. He spent a hundred and twelve dollars and, and…”

  He flipped back to the other receipt. “… and eighty-three cents. He spent it…on salmon heads.”

  Why would Dad buy so many salmon heads? A fishing expedition? Walrus hunting? That's not even legal. Don't tell me my goof ball dad is a
n outlaw. I just can't buy that.

  Billy made up his mind then and there. He was going to figure this thing out. He didn't care if it took all night or if he had to tear the house apart, he was going to get to the bottom of this. And when his parents got home, he'd throw it all right in their faces.

  Piker tore back into the room, a leash clenched in her teeth, whining her very loudest now-now-right -now whine.

  “Sorry, Pike. Pee on the living room carpet if you have to, I'm busy.” Billy upended the garbage can and dumped its entire contents. Piker groaned.

  A few walnut shells twirled out of the mess, slid across the hardwood floor, and glided under Dad's dresser.

  TWING

  “Twing?” Billy peered into the shadowy slit between the bottom of the dresser and the floor. One of the walnut shells had hit something underneath the dresser and made a twinging sound.

  Walnut shells don't make twinging sounds underneath dressers.

  Billy got down on his hands and knees.

  Not unless they hit something… twingworthy.

  He reached one hand under the dresser. First he found the walnut shells. He tossed them aside, reached farther back, and laid his fingers on… something. It was small, cold, and metallic. He pulled it out into the light.

  It was his father's business card case: silver, spotless, smooth as a mirror. Billy had never been allowed to touch it. His father must have knocked it off the top of the dresser by accident. He'd probably been going crazy looking for it.

  Billy turned the shimmering case over in his hands. It had always struck him as odd that an exterminator would have such a fancy-shmancy business card case. But now it struck him as more than odd. It was suspicious, almost sinister.

  This thing is one of the secrets. One of the big ones. Billy popped it open and took out one of the cards:

  A thought flashed into Billy's head: a revelation so startling—and so undeniable—that it seemed to hit him physically, like a punch in the gut.

  BUGZ-B-GON is a lie. There is no BUGZ-B-GON. My parents aren't exterminators. They're …

  Billy crushed the card in his fist and threw it across the room.

  … something else.

  Piker had a strange look in her eyes. As if she knew what he was thinking and wanted to stop him from thinking it.

  All these years I thought they were working late to build up the business…it was all just a scam. There is no business. Or if there is, it has nothing to do with bugs.

  Billy turned the case over one more time and saw something he'd missed the first time around, the sort of detail he'd been training himself to see for years: a tiny button on one side of the case, small as a pimple. He pushed it. There was a soft mechanical whirr as a business card slid out from the bottom of the case, like a high-tech slice of toast. The card was made of steel and had letters engraved on it. They read:

  “AFMEC?”

  Senior Agents. They're members of some weird secret society. “North American Division? Sector Four? Jeez, whatever it is, it's global. It's some sort of secret international organization.”

  Are they spies? Crime fighters? Criminals? “1-800-CREATCH.”

  Piker whimpered. “All right, that does it. Enough digging around this stupid house already. I'm calling this number.”

  Billy pointed a finger at Piker. “You wanna know what AFMEC is?”

  Piker groaned as if it were the very last thing on earth she wanted to know.

  “Well, I do. And I'm about to find out.”

  Billy went to the phone.

  Billy raised the receiver to his ear and prepared to dial the number.

  “Wait.” He put the phone back in its catch. “Can't make this call cold. Gotta get myself ready first.”

  Piker seemed to mellow out as soon as Billy put the phone down.

  “What's the deal, Piker?” asked Billy as he ran to his bedroom. “Don't have to go anymore?”

  Billy jumped over the piles of stuff that covered his bedroom floor—mud-spattered knee pads, neon-striped skateboards, fallen rock-climbing posters—and fired up his computer: a Macintosh, one of the newest models. Billy's parents had nixed the idea of buying a new television, but they were extremely cool when it came to computers. “It's educational,” his dad always said. “That's different.” Billy was on his third brand-new computer.

  “Come on. Warm up already.”

  As soon as he was able to log on he Googled the word AFMEC. Scanning the list of results, he came up with only three possibilities. First was something called the Agriculture and Fisheries Mechanization Committee, which was located—bingo!—in the Philippines. Still, it didn't look like a big enough organization to account for all the globe-trotting his parents had been up to.

  “I don't know. Maybe it's just a front or something.”

  Next was the U.S. Air Force Media Center. It certainly sounded more impressive than the fisheries committee, but it didn't appear to be anything more than a tiny division of the military—and in any case, its activities were limited to duplicating videocassettes and cataloging stock footage of jets taking off and landing.

  “Naw. They wouldn't bother being so sneaky about boring stuff like this.”

  Finally came Al's Fancy Mayonnaise and Eggnog Company. This one Billy rejected almost immediately, but not before wondering why on earth a guy would go into the business of selling both eggnog and mayonnaise. “That's just gross. I'm sorry.”

  Billy spent about a half hour chasing down every lead he could think of based on the words he'd seen on the card: North American Division, Sector Four, even the 1-800-CREATCH phone number. There were loads of results for the first two— none of them related to AFMEC, so far as he could tell—and no results whatsoever for the toll-free number.

  Whoever gets these cards must be under strict orders not to put the number on the Web. Like, under punishment of death or something.

  After a few more searches for anything related to the news story he'd seen (he found nothing), the Outpost in Nome (he found an extremely lame Web page), and even the author of So You Want to Speak Swahili? (he found way more than he had any intention of reading), Billy realized he'd reached the end of what the Internet could teach him about all this.

  “All right. Time to make the call.”

  As Billy picked up the telephone next to his computer, Piker—who had been waiting politely outside the door— seemed to suddenly rediscover her need to pee.

  “Look, I swear, Pike. I won't get mad if you do it on the carpet. Knock yourself out.”

  Piker groaned and began pacing.

  Deet… deet-deet-deet… “One eight hundred,” said Billy as he pressed the numbers. His plan was simple: get hold of someone at this AFMEC place and pry as much information out of the person as he could.

  Deet…deet… deet-deet…

  “C…R…E, A…”

  Judging by how secretive AFMEC insiders were, he knew that anyone he spoke to there would have been told not to give out information to strangers. Least of all strangers who sounded like twelve-year-old boys.

  Deet…deet… deet.

  “…T…C…H.”

  So he would have to do an impersonation. Probably the most important impersonation of his life. Billy Clikk was going to impersonate Jim Clikk.

  Billy was good at imitating his father's voice. He'd been working on it for years, mainly just to make jokes. But now was not a time for jokes. Now it was time for the real thing: a Jim Clikk imitation so convincing even the people he worked for would be fooled.

  Can I pull this off ?

  Sure. I can do it. Just gotta stay calm.

  After one or two rings a recorded message came on: “Welcome to AFMEC,” said a man's voice, deep and far less cheerful-sounding than your average recorded message. It was some sort of European accent: Billy immediately knew that AFMEC was neither an air force media center nor a Filipino fisheries committee.

  “Please hold while our computers register your location….”

&n
bsp; Billy swallowed hard. Whoever he was calling would know exactly where he was. That was pretty scary. No, that was extremely scary.

  For a moment Billy considered hanging up, but curiosity won out. He held the line.

  A different recorded voice came on—a woman's, slightly more cheerful-sounding—and began to list options:

  “If this is a creatch-related emergency, please press zero, pound now.”

  Creatch, thought Billy. That's the key word here. Gotta find out what it means.

  He grabbed a pencil and started taking notes.

  “If you would like to report a creatch sighting, press one now.” Piker was at Billy's feet, wearing a very undoglike expression. She looked as if she were in very serious trouble and were trying to think of a way out.

  “If you are a government official inquiring about a pending creatch-control treaty with AFMEC, please press two, followed by your country code, now.”

  Billy wrote down every word, but what he really needed was an option that went something like this: “If you have recently discovered that your parents are not who they say they are and are trying to figure out what the heck it is they actually do for a living…”

  His fears began to resurface, telling him to put the phone down and forget the whole thing. But he needed answers. What was AFMEC? Why were his parents going everywhere from the Philippines to Finland to Nome? What did people who worked for AFMEC do? And why did they need enormous quantities of salmon heads to do it?

  “If you are a demi-creatch or a creatch informant wishing to apply for AFMEC protection, please press three now.”

  Piker picked up the leash with her teeth in a final attempt to interest Billy in a walk around the block. Billy turned away and looked out the window. The sun had sunk into the woods at the far end of Dullard Road, leaving the sky pinkish gray and empty, apart from a single trail of exhaust coming from an airplane he couldn't see.

  “If you are an AFMEC agent calling to get in touch with AFMEC headquarters, please hang up and call again using your viddy-fone.”

  There was a very long silence. Billy sensed that this was the last option, and with great disappointment—but also a certain amount of relief—he prepared to follow its advice: the hanging up part, anyway.