Mission Unstoppable by Dan Gutman Read Free Book Online

held the fire extinguisher against the door. Coke gave himself some running room and gripped the legs of the desk tightly.
    “You ready?” he asked. “On three.”
    “One . . . two . . . three!” they both hollered.
    Coke took a deep breath and made a run for the door holding the desk in front him like a battering ram. Pep closed her eyes and tensed her muscles to absorb the impact. When the top surface of the desk crashed against the fire extinguisher, it hit a seam in the wood and broke through, cracking the door in half and sending two preteenagers, a school desk, a fire extinguisher, and pieces of splintered wood into the hallway.
    But the hallway was engulfed in flames.

Chapter 7
The Science of Fire
    F ire is an interesting thing. If you’ve ever passed your finger through a candle flame quickly, you know it doesn’t hurt. But leave that finger in the flame for one short second, and it’s a different story.
    Did you ever look deeply into a flame? The white part is hotter than the yellow part, and the yellow part is hotter than the red part. But the hottest part of a flame is the blue part. That’s odd, because we think of blue as the color of cold and red as the color of heat.
    You need three things to create fire: oxygen, heat, and fuel. Combine them, and you get ignition. Take any one of them away, and the fire goes out. The science of fire is pretty simple, really.
    When the average kid comes crashing through a locked door and lands face-first in a hallway filled with smoke and flames, he probably isn’t going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about the science of fire. But Coke McDonald was not an average kid.
    “Avoid the blue flames!” Coke shouted as he landed on top of his sister, who, in turn, had landed on top of the shattered door.
    “Get off of me!” Pep shouted right back.
    The twins jumped off the hot floor and were faced with a nightmare scenario. There were flames and thick smoke in all directions. The sprinkler system in the hallway ceiling had turned on, but the spray of water was no match for the inferno raging around them. Coke and Pep grabbed hold of each other instinctively. There was nothing else to hold on to that wasn’t on fire.
    A lot of paper—toilet paper, paper towels, art supplies, napkins—was stored in the basement of the old school on the shelves next to the detention room. It had ignited fast. Tiny pieces of charred paper were swirling in the air around the frantic twins. But that wasn’t all that was burning. There was a noxious, flammable substance that had been poured all over the floor.
    This fire had been set deliberately.
    Who would want to burn down a school?
    Don’t answer that question.
    The sound of fire engines could be heard in the distance, but that didn’t provide Coke or Pep with any comfort now. The heat was intense. Their eyes were tearing from the smoke, their throats choking to breathe. There was a nasty chemical smell filling the hall. That stuff alone could probably kill you if you inhaled enough of it.
    Pep tried to remember the lessons she’d learned when a firefighter came and spoke at the school a few years earlier. She recalled that he said something about “stop, drop, and roll,” but that wouldn’t help now. The floor was on fire. She wasn’t about to roll around on it.
    Coke’s photographic memory had on file just about everything he’d ever experienced, but he had never bothered to notice where the basement fire exits were located. Even if he knew where they were, those doors could very possibly be locked, or intentionally blocked.
    Coke pulled his T-shirt off over his head.
    “What, are you trying to be macho?” Pep yelled.
    “No, I’m trying to live !” he replied.
    He ripped the shirt in half, wrapping one piece around his mouth and nose and handing the other piece to his sister. She made a mask of her own. As Coke looked up to see if the ceiling was about to collapse on him, he realized that the bottom of his