Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) Read Free

and Scott really hoped Archimedes had a firm grasp of the geometry of the situation.
    “There they are!” shouted someone, and a dozen undercover Freemen in their polos and chinos began to crab walk back through the sea of cars toward the terminal entrance. The fat white van hurtled around the corner, and Scott, Mick, and Merle crossed directly in front of it at top speed, with Archimedes flapping behind.
    The van was braking now, filling the garage with a kind of angry whale song.
    They threw themselves back into the bay of doors, pitched through those doors and into the terminal, then turned just in time to see the reeling white van parallel park itself neatly inside the alcove.
    It was close. The driver’s side mirror was nearly touching the door glass. Freemen tried to squeeze through a gap between the van and the wall, but Scott reached through a crack in the terminal doors and put them to sleep.
    “Hold back!” the Freeman in the black hat ordered.
    On the terminal side, a man with a duffel and a suntan and rubber sandals was just starting to take in the scene.
    “Hey,” he said. “My car is out there.”
    The black-hatted Freeman stood out of range of the wand and glared through the gap.
    “That was your mom that disappeared, wasn’t it, kid?” he asked. “What did you do to her?”
    “We sent her into the future!” Scott called back. Exactly a year into the future, to be precise, but they didn’t need to know that. “She’s safe from you people!”
    “C’mon,” Merle urged. Mick climbed back into the backpack.
    “Is this some kind of flash mob or something?” asked the man in the rubber sandals. “Are you going to move that van soon?”

    “Sorry,” said Scott, and he and Merle proceeded to leave.
    “But my car’s out there. I need it for driving.”
    “Sorry!”
    They jogged back the way they had come and turned toward a down escalator to baggage claim.
    “Stop right there!” someone shouted, and they turned to see the same Freeman who’d interrogated them in the gift shop, running down the moving walkway.
    “What’s he doing awake already?” said Merle.
    Scott squinted at the Slumbro. “You know you have this set on NAP ?”
    “What? Give it here.”
    The escalator was crowded, so they fast stepped down some stairs.
    “She’s … she’s really safe, right?” asked Scott. “Just in the future?”
    “What can I say that’ll make you believe me? I double-checked the math. Archie triple-checked it!”
    “And Emily checked it too?”
    Merle sighed. “Yes, Emily checked it too.”
    The Freeman was negotiating the escalator behind them and speaking into a walkie-talkie.
    “Repeat, subjects are entering C baggage claim. Over.”
    Baggage claim was a wide tiled hall encircled by doors and big windows, filled with people and luggage and luggage carousels. You could turn in either direction to head outdoors, where the curbsides were packed with shuttles and taxis.
    Scott was beginning to understand how to spot the Freemen. They all appeared to be wearing at least a little pink—a scarf, a shirt, maybe a hatband—and a number of them were coming to join him at the base of the stairs. So was a bald and topknotted Hare Krishna in white robes, who’d been slouching over a rattling tambourine and handing out pamphlets near two suitcases in a corner. Everyone else in baggage claim had been doing their best to ignore him, such that most had not even noticed his tall stature or the fact that he’d been chanting “Hairy Christmas” for twenty minutes. But now, standing straight, he towered over Goodco’s pawns like the white king on a chessboard.
    Scott and Merle stopped on the stairs about a half flight from the bottom, so the Freeman on the escalator just passed them, slowly, with an embarrassed look on his face.
    “All right, you two,” another Freeman in a pink tie said to Scott and Merle and, to a lesser extent, Mick. “You can’t put us all to sleep.”
    “Can’t we?”