Secret Weapons by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Read Free Book Online

was still more or less dangling from Bucky Brockhurst’s fist, turned his head to look too. It was Kate who spoke first.
    “Okay. Let’s go,” she said. “Anybody else want to see what these terrorists look like?”
    “Yeah. I’m with you.” Bucky dropped Ari and motioned to the other PROs. “Come on, dudes. Let’s go see what this terrorist junk is all about.”
    “O-k-k-kay,” Carlos whispered between his chattering teeth. “Let’s g-g-go.”
    So Kate went first, with Aurora right beside her, as always. And then came the three PROs with Susie Garcia right behind them.
    “Come on, Ari.” Athena grabbed Ari’s hand. “Let’s go too.” Ari shook off his sister’s hand, pulled down his jacket where Bucky had jerked it up around his ears, and joined the procession. At the rear.
    As they marched down the Wongs’ driveway, close together in an eight-kid clump, Ari began to feel excited without knowing exactly why. As a reporter he knew he was supposed to stick to the facts, and the one fact that he knew for sure and certain was that he, himself, had made up the whole terrorist story. With a little help, of course, from one of Carson Nicely’s crazy ideas. So what was there to be excited about?
    However, although that fact was the only thing he knew for sure and certain, there were some other things he knew, or almost knew, in a different kind of way. There had been, for instance, the strange way Aurora had acted when she heard about the two men in a big black van, and what she had said about them being “evil.” Ari had never been entirely sure whether his sister’s mysterious feelings could be classified as facts or not. Sometimes he was pretty sure they couldn’t. But at other times he wasn’t so sure. Like right now, for instance.
    The clump of kids had almost reached the sidewalk when Ari began to notice that Athena was talking to him, and had been talking to him for quite a while. Jerking on the back of his jacket, she had been saying the same thing over and over again. “What’s a terrist? What’s a terrist, Ari?”
    “Shhh,” Ari whispered. “Terrorists are bad people.”
    Athena went on jerking on his jacket. “Why? Why are they bad? …” she was beginning again when Kate, at the head of the clump, stopped so suddenly that everyone ran into each other.
    “There they are,” Kate whispered.
    Ari sidled sideways until he could look around the fifth-grade part of the clump and on up the sidewalk toward the Andersons’.
    And there they were. A big black van had pulled up in front of the Andersons’ house and two men were getting out. One of them, a short, round-headed guy with a bald spot, was standing near the door on the driver’s side. And the other one, a taller guy with long stringy hair and a weird woolly-looking vest, was opening the back.
    Ari was still leaning out around Carlos’s elbow when he began to be aware that Athena was peeking around him. She was talking again, too, jerking on his jacket and saying, “Is that them? Is that the terrists, Ari?”
    “Shhh!” everybody said at once. “Shh.” And then some people added other things like, “Be still, Athena,” and “They’ll hear you,” and “Shut your mouth, kid.” As Ari jerked his little sister back behind the big kids and put his hand over her mouth, he bumped into Carlos, and Carlos must have bumped into someone in front of him because all of a sudden they were all moving forward again. On around the cul-de-sac passing Dragoland and heading toward the Andersons’ and the black van. They went on moving, kind of oozing forward, stopping and getting bumped from behind and moving forward again until the man who had opened the back of the van straightened up and looked right at them.
    The tall, stringy-haired man had been bending over, reaching into the back of the van and lifting out something that looked large and heavy, like an extra-big backpack. But when he saw the bunch of kids coming down the sidewalk he