Our flying toilet bowl rose rapidly above us. A rope whipped me in the face and I snatched at it desperately. I caught it, twisted my hands into it, and wrapped my legs around it just as Freak threw his arms around my waist. The rope, attached to the balloon’s basket, yanked us out of the tree in a burst of exploding twigs and furiously flying crow feathers.
We skimmed the treetops and got whacked by the uppermost branches. The crow continued to swoop around us and attack. The wind was taking us in the same direction as the Omaha but at a much lower altitude.
A dangerously lower altitude.
“If we don’t make it to the basket and fire the burner,” I shouted, “we’re going to crash!”
“No kidding,” muttered Freak as he got his own grip on the rope and let go of me. “Get climbing!”
I was above him. Fortunately, it was another challenge requiring upper-body strength. I started pulling myself up hand-over-hand. The crow kept flying into my face, but I had gotten used to him. He was the least of our problems. The nylon rope kept slipping through our fingers.
The rope twisted as we tried to climb it. After a few moments we were spinning around and swinging back and forth, like a carnival ride you shouldn’t be on immediately after eating.
“Tossing cookies!” Freak warned me before barfing above Breeland Road with enough spin to send it spraying like a rotary lawn sprinkler. It caught the crow in the eye and sent it squawking.
The balloon rose a bit after the loss of ballast. Freak had been sneaking a lot of the auction hors d’oeuvres. I wondered if it would help if I puked, too. I considered it, then decided I didn’t have it in me.
The balloon was skimming the field just before our houses. I could see that Freak and I were going to be slammed against a roof if nothing changed. With one final effort, I hauled myself up the remaining section of rope and threw myself into the basket. I jumped up and pulled down on the burner-release lever with all my might.
With a roar, a huge flame shot up toward the balloon’s envelope. The balloon immediately started to rise, but it didn’t look as though it would rise fast enough to miss the houses. The basket just cleared a chimney, but I heard the rope lash against the bricks.
“Freak!” I screamed, and looked over the side.
My friend was clinging to the side of the basket. My hand shot out and clasped his, and I pulled him to safety.
“Got any breath mints?” he asked, then tumbled into the basket.
I kept my hand on the burner lever for the next minute or so. The bowl of the enormous toilet above me glowed intensely from the flame of the gas jet. It looked like a warning against overindulging in jalapeños. We rose to the same height as the Omaha, about three hundred feet.
When we had inflated the balloons that afternoon, Alf had explained the basics of hot-air flight to us. To go up, you either made the air inside the envelope warmer or you dropped ballast and made the basket lighter. To descend, you either allowed the air in the envelope to cool or, to descend more quickly, you opened the parachute valve at the top of the envelope and let the warm air out. That was all there was to it. There was no such thing as steering.
“We’re gaining on them!” Freak sounded surprised.
“I think it’s the flush tank,” I said. “It’s acting like a sail.”
“Thank you, Science Girl,” said Freak. We looked at each other, suddenly realizing how much we’d miss her if anything happened to her.
The wind was out of the west, propelling the balloons toward Rodmore. The night was clear, the moon was full, and we could see Fiona and Disin outlined in the basket of the Omaha. Fiona was unrestrained. But then, there was nowhere she could go. She was in the corner of the basket opposite Disin, gripping one of the ropes connecting the balloon to the basket and staring at her feet. I could tell she was concentrating on not looking over the basket’s edge. As we watched, Disin tossed a sandbag out.
Freak and I winced as the sandbag hit Took Lane, the last street before Hellsboro, and burst with a sickening splat!
“If he decides he doesn’t need a hostage any longer—” I said, leaving the thought unfinished as I suddenly got a lump in my throat.
Abruptly, the Omaha dropped. Fiona screamed. The balloon plummeted to within fifty feet of the ground, then Disin fired the gas jet full throttle and their descent slowed. After a moment, the balloon began to rise.
“Are you okay?” Freak shouted to Fiona. She shakily waved and nodded. We had gotten close enough to see small gestures. “What just happened?” Freak said, turning to me. “Why’d they drop?”
I tried to figure it out. I looked at the ground, where Took Lane was gliding by below us and the border of Hellsboro was rapidly approaching. I saw smoke curl from a Hellsboro fissure, and I knew.
“It’ll happen to us, too!” I shrieked, jumping for the gas jet and pulling it down just in time. A tower of flame shot upward, heating the air above us.
We crossed the border between Sunnyside and Hellsboro. The balloon bobbed a bit, but it didn’t drop as far as the Omaha had, because we had raised the temperature of the air inside it.
“The air above Hellsboro is warmer than the air above the surrounding countryside,” I shouted, loud enough for Fiona to hear, because I hoped she’d appreciate how I was thinking the way she did. “A hot air balloon only stays up if the air inside it is much warmer than the air outside it. Hellsboro is a seriously bad place for ballooning.”
We were now only thirty seconds behind the Omaha. Both balloons were level at two hundred feet. Fiona suddenly started screaming at us.
“Go up! Go up! The two of you! You have to climb!”
“Shut up!” barked Disin. “Or you’ll join that sandbag!”
“She wants our balloon to go higher,” Freak said. “Maybe she thinks we can come down on top of him!”
“No, that’s not what she’s saying—look at what she’s doing!”
I pointed. Fiona, the girl who was terrified of heights, was climbing up the rigging. She was trying to tangle herself in one of the ropes. She was looking upward at the underside of the balloon. She had given up coherent speech in favor of whimpering. Still, I thought she was incredibly brave. Then Disin stood up on the edge of the basket opposite her and grabbed one of the ropes, and I knew what was about to happen.
“We have to climb!” I screamed. “Not the balloon! Us! Up the ropes! He’s going to drop the baskets!”
Disin had picked Alf’s pocket. He had the remote-control device that disconnected the baskets from the balloons. Alf had no idea which balloon Disin might try to escape in, so the remote, I decided, must drop both baskets simultaneously.
Our balloon’s basket was about to fall two hundred feet to the smoldering surface of Hellsboro.
Freak and I scrambled to get ourselves into the rigging. We hauled ourselves up the ropes, trying to figure out how high we had to go before we were safe. I swung from rope to rope, trying to convince myself it was no worse than playing on monkey bars.
I looked over at the Omaha. Disin was about five feet above the edge of his basket. He was leaning into the center, reaching for something.
“What’s he doing?” demanded Freak.
Disin snagged what he was reaching for. It was a blue plastic handle attached to a cord that disappeared into the Omaha’s envelope.
“PARACHUTE VALVE!” Freak and I shouted together. It was the valve that opened a flap in the balloon to let hot air out. It was good to have if you needed to make a quick emergency landing.
I looked around for ours. It was midway between Freak and me. Neither one of us could reach it.
Disin dug into his coat pocket and pulled out the remote. Unintentionally, he also pulled out a handkerchief. The handkerchief snagged one additional item. It looked, to me, about the size and shape of the box containing the zucchini crayon. It came out with the handkerchief and fell into the basket below. Disin, I could tell, hadn’t noticed. If he had, he wouldn’t have done what he did next.
He pressed the button on the remote and blew the baskets off the balloons.
“LOOK OUT!” Freak and I screamed at each other.
The bolts exploded. It was as though four M-80 firecrackers had gone off simultaneously at the four corners of each basket. Our basket, with its burner and propane tank, fell away, hit Hellsboro, and exploded. The Omaha’s basket simultaneously fell, hit, and rolled without exploding. Both balloons rose rapidly and started to spin.
The motion made me dizzy, but I managed to focus on the Omaha as it swept past. Fiona and Disin still clung to its ropes. Fiona was shrieking. Disin opened the parachute valve, and the balloon began to descend. Rodmore Chemical was dead ahead.
“Is he going to land on the roof?” I shouted.
“Looks like!”
We, on the other hand, looked like we were going to sail right over Rodmore and crash and burn on the far side of Hellsboro.
“Parachute valve!” I bellowed at Freak, above the sound of rushing wind. He nodded and lunged for it. His fingers just missed it and he lost his grip.
“Freak!” I screamed as I saw him drop.
He fell five feet and caught the last possible rope between him and Hellsboro. I reached down my hand for him but he was too far away.
“Valve!” he hollered up at me.
The parachute valve was beyond his reach. It was up to me.
I swung once or twice to build up momentum. Monkey bars! I reminded myself, and I let go.
I’d never felt more like a monkey in my life. I caught the valve and my full weight came down on it. I dropped three feet and felt something give, high up in the balloon. It was the lid of the flush tank opening. The Dear John began to drop.
I dangled from the valve and watched as Disin maneuvered the misshapen remains of the Omaha like a hang glider. The rapidly deflating balloon landed on the roof of Rodmore’s main building and was carried along by the breeze.
Disin scrambled to his feet, still clutching one of the ropes. He caught an upright vent pipe, wrapped the rope around it, and stopped the balloon before it could go over the edge. This was good, since Fiona was still tangled in the balloon’s ropes and would have gone over with it.
We hit the roof moments later. Freak hit first and rolled, taking the impact in his shoulders. I came down next to him, and yards and yards of porcelain-white fabric came down on top of us.
After lying there unmoving for a moment or two, I staggered to my feet and tried to find my way out from under the fabric. I thrashed around a bit and finally found an opening. Freak emerged a second or two after I did.
We were surrounded by doghats.