12 Duct Tape and Rock and Roll

Chapter 12 DUCT TAPE AND ROCK AND ROLL Coke and Pep were still in a state of shocked disbelief as the RV pulled out of the huge Cedar Point parking lot. Mya and Bones had told them they would be safe until they got to Washington. And then this happened. Every time they let down their guard, Coke thought, every time they took a deep breath and relaxed a little, something terrible happened. Maybe they would never be safe. Maybe these lunatics would be chasing them for the rest of their lives. "So how were the roller coasters?" Mrs. McDonald asked excitedly. "Did you have an awesome time?" "Yeah," Coke replied without enthusiasm. "Awesome."

"Awesome," mumbled Pepsi. Their parents were disappointed. They had devoted the whole day to doing something just for the kids, but it didn't seem to have made the kids happy. They just sat in the back of the RV, silently. Dr. McDonald figured that after riding a dozen roller coasters and being dropped, flipped, spun, and thrown every which way, maybe the twins' brains were a little out of whack. It was getting past dinnertime. Dr. McDonald pulled into Cedar Point Camper Village, a few miles away in Sandusky. The campground featured a shuffleboard court, a game room, and an outdoor pool. But all Coke and Pep wanted to do was sleep. They didn't even want dinner. Their parents went to the snack bar to get something for themselves. Having gone to bed so early, Coke woke up at five a.m., before anyone else in the family. He pulled on a pair of jeans and wandered outside. The campground was quiet. It was peaceful. Nobody else was awake. The only thing open was the game room, so Coke went in.

It was a tiny room, with just three arcade games in it—a shoot-'em-up called Kill Them All, a driving game called Pedal to the Metal, and an old Ms. Pac-Man machine. Despite the hour, the games were plugged in and turned on, playing their "attract mode." That's the screen display that is shown when nobody is playing an arcade game. The idea is to attract the next player. Or, more specifically, the next quarter. Kill Them All looked interesting. The screen showed guys in camouflage blowing away an army of zombies with machine guns. INSERT COIN flashed in the middle of the screen. Coke stepped up to the console and reached into his pocket. He didn't have any money with him. The coin return was empty. He

pushed the start button for the heck of it, on the off chance that the last player had walked away in the middle of a game. Instantly, this flashed on the screen: EKOC EKOC EKOC EKOC EKOC Well, it didn't take an encryption expert—or his sister—to figure out that EKOC was COKE backward. And Coke was pretty sure those letters were not referring to the soft drink. In a few seconds they were replaced by this message, in bright blue glowing letters: WBUAOHYY It flashed just once and disappeared in a simulated puff of smoke, but Coke had already memorized it. He ran back to the RV and woke up his sister. "I think we got another cipher," he whispered in her ear. "Where?" Pep asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "On the screen of a video game in the game

room." Coke took Pep's notebook and wrote the letters out. WBUAOHYY Quietly, so they wouldn't wake their parents, the twins tiptoed outside to sit at the picnic table next to their RV. "It looks a little like the call letters of a radio station," Pep said as she examined the message. "Too many letters," Coke told her. "Radio stations are always WHYY or WCBS, stuff like that." "You say you saw this on an arcade game screen?" Pep asked. "How do you know it isn't the name of the person who has the high score, or something like that?" "Before it flashed this message," Coke told her, "it was flashing E-K-O-C over and over again. My name backward. I know it's a message for me." Pep looked at the letters more closely. Obviously, they didn't mean anything spelled

backward. It didn't seem to be an anagram. Every second, third, or fourth letter meant nothing. The consecutive Ys made her think "why why" could be part of the message, but nothing else seemed to fit. She tried all the usual codes she knew, but none of them worked. This was a tough one. The sun was peeking through the trees. People were starting to emerge from their tents and RVs to begin their day. And suddenly, Pep got it. "It's simple!" she said excitedly. "This is a half- reversed alphabet!" Pep took the pen from her brother and wrote out the alphabet in two lines. ABCDEFGHIJKLM NOPQRSTUVWXYZ "I don't get it," Coke said. Pep drew a line under the cipher: WBUAOHYY. "If you break the twenty-six letters of the alphabet into two lines of thirteen letters," Pep said, "each letter is directly above or below another letter. The W is below the J, so the first letter of the