Chapter Two
More Badness
After that they went away. They went to France because they had better doctors there. One day Lee used crutches to find Ben and Lisette stranded on the beach with bare feet and a poisonous jellyfish dead on the beach. So Lee said, “Don’t move or the poison will spread. Don’t wink, blink, or talk or walk, don’t do anything except breathe.” Lee put a blanket of seaweed on them and gathered the shells that had points and threw them down into the ocean and got a ambulance to rescue them. Afterwards they were crippled and brought back crutches to use. “But there are no poisonous jellyfish in France,” said all the people, “except the rare moneoe who live in the west not in the east of Paris.”
“Anne, where are you?” said Sylvia. They found Anne dead with a bullet in her forehead, lying on the floor dying with red fingerprints on the gun and a note which read:
A foolish girl who called the police first sight of me and if you want to live keep the police out of this or you will soon have a blown up Europe and 9,000,000,000,000 dead people including you.
Signed, Red Romer
Their parents cried, Lisette screamed, Lee shuddered, and Sylvia gasped and the nurse fainted, but it seemed Anne was laughing. She opened her eyes and stood up. “Good trick I played on that Red Romer,” she said, and all saw her taking a piece of plastic off her forehead. Then everybody started laughing. The nurse woke up and rubbed her eyes and laughed too and went to do research.
Lisette and Ben used crutches and could both run and walk. They ate more and slept better. One day the 9,000,000,000 people of Europe were robbed, 601 were killed, 700 houses were ruined or burned down. Then a phony storm came up—wind, clouds, rain, thunder, mist, lightning, snow, frost, and hail—and they went in it so they had to stay there for a while.