Erno ran the rest of the way home, too, the cake forgotten. He ran down three streets and up the concrete steps to their house, crunched through the dead leaves, and crossed the porch and dashed through the front door, which was standing open, and stopped suddenly in the foyer in front of a great piece of butcher paper tacked to the wall, the same thing Emily must have seen when she had first arrived. It read:
ERNO AND EMILY,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
GOOD-BYE.
Erno mouthed the last word and frowned. He had barely the time to take it in before he heard a great deal of creaking floorboards in the living room and a woman’s voice.
Then a groaning noise made Erno whirl around, and he was startled to see a six-foot-tall, pink-marshmallow man pushing the door shut behind him. Given a moment, he realized it was only a regular man, dressed from head to toe in the same sort of rubber suit he’d seen Mr. Wilson wear at the Goodco factory. It was the color of stomach medicine. It was the color of ear medicine, come to think of it. The man stared out at Erno through a clear plastic oval and grabbed his arm with a white glove.
“Hey! Leggo. Emily! Where are you?”
“She’s here,” said the woman around the corner, and when Erno was hustled into the living room, he saw that it was their doctor. She was a tall woman in a deep blue outfit with a jacket like origami, and she was surrounded by four more men in identical pink suits.
Erno had always been strangely worried by the doctor’s appearance. Her dark and sloping eyes, her striking, predatory face. Her brow was topped by precision bangs and curtained with straight, waist-length hair of such dissolving blackness that it resembled liquid, like ink. If you watched carefully you would swear her hair did not seem to quite sync with the movements of her body, or the air, but rather shivered at the ends as if caught in the hot vapors of her temper. And you did watch the doctor carefully, or else you stared at your feet.
Emily was trembling and staring at her feet in a chair in the center of the room. There was an empty chair beside her.
“Have a seat, Erno,” the doctor said, “and tell us where your father is.”
Erno didn’t move right away, so he was pushed into place by the pink man behind him.
“You’re our doctor,” he said slowly. “From Goodco.”
“Very good, Erno,” she said. “Shows you’ve been paying attention. I am your doctor. But I am also your father’s supervisor, and I demand to know where he is.”
Erno just stared, wordlessly, at the strangeness of it all. The doctor changed tactics. She crouched down beside them, and her voice became suddenly soft, lilting, the sort of voice adults think will soothe children. This voice could have narrated a cartoon about ponies.
“See, the thing is, Erno, we need your help! And you and your, ah … sister have already been sooo helpful to us all these years. Yes, you have!”
Emily, who out of fear had not so much as looked at Erno when he arrived, now whispered something she may have never said before.
“I don’t understand.”
The doctor smiled in an unpleasant way. “Oh, I rather doubt that, dear,” she said, and a pink-suit man chuckled.
“You see,” the doctor continued, “for several years we’ve been testing out a special chemical on you: Milk-7. We’d like to put it in our cereals. It’s a very, very special chemical that makes you smarter! And now we are finishing our tests, and we need your father’s notes. They … seem to have disappeared, like magic! As has your father.”
Erno said, “Um, ma’am…”
“Oh, ‘ma’am’ is so formal,” the woman said. “Call me something else. Vivian is nice. Would you like to call me Vivian?”
“Is that your name?” Erno asked.
“No.”
“Ah. Um, so …. Mr. Wilson …. worked for you?”
“In Research and Development, yes.”
“And he’s been giving Emily and me—”
“Oh no, no,” she said. “Not you. Just Emily. You were in the control group.”
Emily shuddered.
“Okay,” Erno said slowly, “so … Emily’s been given that … Milk—”
“Oh, don’t call it Milk-7,” said the woman who wasn’t named Vivian. “That sounds so clinical, doesn’t it? We call it IntelliJuice™.”
One of the pink men cleared his throat. “Actually, I believe Marketing is now calling it ThinkDrink™.”
Not-Vivian smiled a thin smile.
“ThinkDrink™ then. Fine. Regardless, soon it will be just one of the tasty chemicals that go into making Agent SuperCar™ Cereal so Naturally Good™.”
Erno fidgeted in his chair and frowned. “I thought corn was what made Agent SuperCar™ cereal so ‘Naturally Good.’”
Not-Vivian looked alarmed, as though Erno had said something you clearly could not make a cereal out of. Sofa cushions. Astronauts.
“Corn?” she said, looking back at the crowd of marshmallow men. “Are they putting corn in there now?”
“Of course there’s corn,” said Erno. “It says so on the front of the box. In our cupboard. ‘Made with Corn.’”
One of the men went to fetch the box. Erno glanced at Emily, slumped heavily in her chair. She would have looked like a rag doll if it wasn’t for the glassy terror in her eyes. The man returned.
“Ah, here we are,” said Not-Vivian, holding the cereal box. She pointed at a label on the front. “Made with Gorn. Gorn. That’s a G.”
Erno stared.
“And if people like ThinkDrink™ in Agent SuperCar™ Cereal,” she continued, “well, then we’ll introduce it into the whole family of Goodco cereals: Puftees™, Burlap Crisp™, Honey Frosted Snox™, Cud™…. Imagine … breakfast cereals that make you smarter! What parent wouldn’t buy them for their child, despite the regrettable side effects.”
Emily said something too softly to hear.
“What was that, dear?” said Not-Vivian. “Speak up.”
“I said, ‘Where’s our dad?’”
Not-Vivian stood up. She looked so tall suddenly.
“We … don’t know. He was supposed to have brought the two of you in to the labs today. He never arrived, and, needless to say, neither did you. And his cell phone is no longer in service. But he will be found. His data will be found,” said Not-Vivian in a voice that was suddenly cold and low. Then, just as suddenly, she was a pony cartoon again, albeit a cartoon about very bad ponies. “Until then you two will come with us! We’ll do all sorts of fun tests. No … not tests. Games! We’ll see how well you exercise in the Exercise Room and watch you interact in the Play Room…. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? And then there’s the Sleep Observation Lab (that’s not a very good name, is it; we’ll call that the Nap Room), and the Needle Room—”
Erno flinched. “Needle Room?”
“Yes, but that’s not really a good name for it, either. It isn’t so much a room as it is a tank that we’ll keep you in—”
Emily flipped. She shrieked and kicked Not-Vivian in the shin, then ran for the front door. Erno followed, but they were both quickly cornered and grabbed up by the men in pink suits. Emily continued to wail and kick, but her captor held her with arms outstretched like a bag of garbage. Erno looked around frantically for something, anything that might help him; and then suddenly, there it was. There he was, his head nearly touching the ceiling, though no one had heard him come in.
Erno should have remembered that it was Wednesday, the day Biggs came.