Max Tilt: 80 Days or Die Read online

  DEDICATION

  Αιωνία η μνήμη

  In loving memory of my dad, Nicholas P. Lerangis.

  He is in every word

  and always will be.

  1921–2017

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Peter Lerangis

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  NO one ever paid attention to the man with the drooping eye. He moved swiftly through the London streets like a stale wind. Sometimes he mumbled, and sometimes he broke into a dance that resembled a fit of electrocution. He smelled oddly sweet and moldy, and his skin was like parched paper. These traits were fine for a book but not so much for a human.

  So of course people avoided him. On a gray August morning when he stopped short on a crowded sidewalk, they walked politely around the man as if he didn’t exist. They kept their eyes on their phones. They minded their own business.

  Hearing a noise, the old man looked up. Even in the summer he felt cold, always cold, and he pulled his thin black raincoat tight around him. He’d lost the belt years ago, a great disadvantage on a damp, cloudy day. He trained his good eye on a neon orange-and-black jet emerging from the clouds. His sight was weak, but he could make out the name emblazoned on the tail.

  TILT.

  It was a strange name for a jet, to be sure. But that did not explain the old man’s reaction.

  “By the ghost of Gaston!” he squealed. Then he leaped into a complex little jig, his legs twirling and twiddling like rubber sticks. It would have been an impressive display, but as no one was watching, there was no one to be impressed.

  Fishing a flip phone from his pocket, he tapped out a message. They’re here.

  The answer came back immediately. Yes, I noticed. Not modest, are they?

  With a grin, the old man shoved the phone back into his pocket. As he shuffled quickly through the grim and growing crowd, he smiled. He was in a good mood now, so he muttered merry greetings.

  But he got no replies.

  No one ever paid attention to the man with the drooping eye.

  1

  A FEW DAYS EARLIER . . .

  MAX hadn’t planned on drifting off into space. Space found him.

  To be more precise, what found him was a conveyance into space.

  It was just sitting in a field behind his school. A lot of other things were sitting in the field too, like a dozen trailers, a roller coaster not quite fastened down, three wooden stages, stacks of metal risers and chairs, tools and tape, and a garish sign that said Midsoutheastern Ohio State Fair Coming in August.

  Conveyance was a word that meant “a way of getting someplace.” It was a better word than vehicle or vessel. That was a fact, and Max was fond of facts. His homemade drone Vulturon was a conveyance, but that had been crushed in the hatch of a submarine in the Atlantic Ocean.

  This conveyance, the one in the field behind the gate, was, in fact, a balloon. A big hot-air balloon.

  Now, outside of the land of Oz, it is not normal for a hot-air balloon to be sitting in a field all ready to go. It is even less normal for a balloon to beckon to a human being. But a day earlier, Max had looked out his bedroom window and seen the balloon floating high above his house, trailing a banner to advertise the fair. In its basket were a man and woman in old-timey clothes, waving to the roofs below. In the center of the basket, a thick flame shot upward through a hole at the bottom of the balloon. The hot air was lighter than the cooler atmosphere, which caused the balloon to rise. That was another fact.

  Max had nearly dropped his iPad in his rush to get to his window and wave back, but they hadn’t seen him. Maybe they’d been looking at the roofs. Shingles were interesting, if you really took the time to read about them. But Max had had the weird feeling that the balloon itself had noticed him. It had seemed to turn toward him, dipping in the direction of his house. As if it were bowing.

  Now, standing outside the field in the wee minutes before sunrise, Max decided to investigate. He didn’t always take sunrise walks, but sometimes he had insomnia, and this seemed as good a thing to do as any. He didn’t feel unsafe. He was, after all, thirteen and could take care of himself. And ever since he and his cousin Alex had found the treasure hidden by the famous author Jules Verne, everyone in Savile had become supernice to him. That included the Fearsome Foursome, who used to make fun of him for being “on the spectrum,” which wasn’t a bad thing when you realized that rainbows were spectra and they were pretty much perfect. Also most people didn’t know that spectra was the plural of spectrum, a fact that Max liked very much.

  As he strolled closer to the field, he realized the gate was open.

  It occurred to him that it shouldn’t have been left open, and that someone had probably stumbled out of one of those trailers, forgotten to shut the gate, and was now fast asleep, facedown in a plate of scrambled eggs at the Nightowl Diner on Ash Street. But open gates, as far as Max was concerned, were meant to be walked through. Which he did.

  He stepped around the platforms and metal beams and piles of this and that. “Hi, thanks for inviting me,” he said as he approached the balloon basket. He knew this was silly because balloons do not really make invitations, but saying it made him smile because it sure felt that way. The basket was smaller than he’d expected. He could have just stepped over the edge into it, but there was a door with a latch, so he used that. Metal bars rose up from the sides of the basket to form a kind of frame that came together a foot or so over his head, making a small platform. In the center of the platform was a contraption that looked a little like a gun and a little like a miniature barbecue, pointed upward. This was called a brazier. Max wasn’t sure how he knew that, but a steady diet of facts did that to you sometimes. Above that contraption was the balloon material, limp like a pile of blankets. It was made of a special kind of fabric, but Max couldn’t remember what that was called.

  He spotted a pair of gloves on the basket floor, which he put on. He reached up, grabbing a handhold at the base of the gun-like contraption. His index finger came to rest on a switch, so he snapped it down. It sparked.

  That seemed pretty cool.

  He tried it again and again—until finally a flame burst upward from the contraption. That caused him to pull his hand back with a start. It s
eemed like the flame should have burned the balloon material or melted it. But that didn’t happen.

  Instead, the fabric began to move, as if it were alive, waking from the night’s sleep. It shifted around slowly, and then a little faster. The flowing pattern of the fabric’s motion was so fascinating to watch that it took a while for Max to realize that the stuff was actually rising.

  Max knew that it would continue to rise until it assumed the shape it had been sewn to, which in this case was a balloony sphere. But he did not want that to happen at all. He grabbed the handhold again but couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. Whatever he was doing only seemed to make the flame stronger.

  He considered running away. But it wouldn’t be right for the balloon to float up and away from the state fair, to be lost in the atmosphere. That was like stealing.

  Max pressed buttons, flicked levers, twisted, yanked, and turned anything he could. He concentrated so fiercely on the contraption above him, that he wasn’t really noticing what the balloon itself was doing.

  Rising.

  The fabric reached its balloon shape faster than he expected. He felt the basket teeter, and he almost fell out. As he left the ground, he gripped the edge of the basket wall. The field below him began to recede. He could see the roof of his school. Fear of heights was called acrophobia and he didn’t have that, but he did have unlimited-rising-into-space-with-no-way-to-control-it-phobia. And he was beginning to move fast.

  “He-e-e-e-e-ey!” he shrieked. “He-e-e-elp!”

  But even before the sound left his mouth, a door flew open in the side of a trailer, and a large barefoot man in a T-shirt and checked boxer shorts was racing outside, spitting out some very bad words.

  “Throw up, dope!” the man shouted. At least that was what Max thought he said, until he repeated it and Max realized it was “Throw out the rope!”

  Max hadn’t even noticed the rope coiled in the corner of the basket. It was thick and heavy, but he managed to hoist it out over the edge. As the coil hurtled downward, the basket tipped again. Max clutched tight to the rope, his knuckles white.

  The smell of fish rushed into his nostrils. For reasons no one knew, Max always smelled fish when he was afraid.

  The end of the rope slapped against the ground, and the man in the T-shirt grabbed onto it. He was shouting something, but Max couldn’t hear it. Now another man had joined him. That guy was shouting too. Max held tight to the rope as the guys pulled and pulled the other end. The basket was tipped almost horizontal now. On the positive side, that caused the flame to angle away from the hole in the bottom of the balloon, which helped keep it from rising. And the men were strong, pulling Max and the balloon closer.

  On the negative side, Max was about to fall.

  He felt his feet sliding along the now-horizontal basket. He tried to hang tight to the rope, and at this distance he could hear the men clearly. They were saying, “Don’t hold onto the rope!”

  Now they were telling him.

  Max let go. The basket juddered. But the sudden upward thrust of the edge caught him at the knees and he flipped upward.

  And over.

  Max screamed. As he dropped toward the ground, he caught a glimpse of the horizon, and it occurred to him it would be the last sunrise of his life.

  2

  “YOU did what?”

  Smriti Patel’s voice sounded different in the Tilts’ new kitchen. It was bigger than the old one. They were standing in the part that used to be a driveway, before the Tilts had bought the house next door and torn it down. Now the Tilts had a beautiful garden, a humongous kitchen, and a glassed-in study for Mom that was protected by a Hulk action figure Max had made with his 3D printer. Also a bathtub shaped like a battleship, Sonos in every room, furniture from Italy, toilets from Japan, two Teslas, a private jet, and a framed portrait of the science-fiction writer Jules Verne hanging in their living room.

  These are the kinds of things that happened when you found a secret buried treasure on an island off the coast of Greenland. Which Max and his cousin Alex did, due to finding a hidden note in their attic left by Verne, who was Max’s great-great-great-grandfather. After his adventure, Max was ready to have a normal life without mortal danger and media attention. He didn’t mean for his balloon escapade to happen. But Smriti was the first person who had actually noticed the bruises on his arm.

  “I fell off a trampoline,” Max said in answer to her question.

  He and Smriti and their friend Evelyn Lopez were making cupcakes for Max’s mom’s birthday. Not long ago it had looked like she might not see the day. But doctors had found a way to make her cancer-free, so this was the most special birthday of all time, and it needed the most special chocolate cupcakes of all time.

  Smriti was Max’s best friend. She lived across the street. Evelyn was Max’s partner in robotics class and was just about as addicted to facts. One fact about her was that she had a condition called scleroderma. It made her skin waxy and hard and forced her to use a wheelchair. Basically, all her organs were hardening and there was no cure, so things were either going to stay the same or get worse, but those were facts they both preferred not to think about. Evelyn had a great nose for things that weren’t facts too, so Max was not surprised when she said in response to his trampoline comment, “I don’t believe you.”

  “Yeah, that’s a lie,” Max said, taking a heavy bag of peanut M&M’s out of the cupboard. They’d already put cinnamon, white chocolate chips, and bananas into the cupcake mix, but it needed more. “But that’s what I promised I would say. The state fair people didn’t want me to admit what happened. They thought it would be bad for their reputation.”

  “So what’s the truth?” Smriti said.

  “I took a ride in a hot-air balloon.”

  They both gave him the LSS Look. Long, Silent, Stupefied. Max didn’t understand that look, but he knew that people had ways of thinking that didn’t exactly connect with his, which was OK. Sometimes they just drifted off into a confused silence and figured it out later, and Max was patient.

  Dumping some M&M’s into the mix, he snuck a quick glance at the clock—6:37. Mom’s book club buddies were scheduled to bring her to the house at seven o’clock for the surprise. The cupcakes would take twenty minutes to bake.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

  Together, the three ladled the mix into cupcake tins. As Max shoved the tins inside the oven, a scream rang out from the doorway behind them: “I cannot believe they did this to us!”

  It was his cousin Alex, that’s all, but she had a habit of getting overexcited, and Max jumped. His wrist touched the oven edge, which was a couple of degrees short of a gazillion. “Yeoow!”

  “Ohhhh, sorry!” she said. “Let’s get that wrist under cold water.”

  She was holding her phone, so she set it near the sink and shoved Max’s wrist under the cold water tap. Alex was eighteen, five years older than Max, with a luxuriant explosion of curly hair courtesy of her African-American mother and piercing green eyes from her French-Canadian dad. But right now, her face was a shade of deep crimson.

  “Is he going to be OK?” Evelyn asked.

  “We can always do a wrist transplant,” Smriti said.

  This, Max knew, was a joke. He could tell by the way the left side of Smriti’s lip curled.

  “Finish baking the cupcakes first, then surgery,” Max said through gritted teeth. As Smriti shut the oven door, Evelyn wheeled herself closer and glanced curiously at Alex’s phone screen. “You just complained that somebody did something to you. But all I see is an obituary.”

  Max leaned over and looked:

  — BASILE WICKERSHAM GRIMSBY —

  Beloved uncle, brother, colleague of many, Mr. Grimsby was a man of diverse talents: singer, cartographer, sea captain, marine biologist. He perished undersea after the malfunction of his submarine, while saving the lives of the two young American heirs to the Jules Verne fortune. Memorial service to be held Sunday, August
21, 11 a.m., at the Alfred P. Twombley Funeral Parlor, London.

  “Basile is the guy who saved our lives,” Alex said. “When the submarine ran out of fuel, we could have been sucked into a whirlpool. But he made us all swim to safety. Max and I barely survived. He didn’t. He sacrificed himself for us.”

  “His last name was Grimsby?” Max said. “He never told us that.”

  “Check out the date,” Alex said. “August 21! Two days from now. Did we know? No! No invitation, no nothing. What’s up with that?”

  “You could send flowers,” Smriti offered.

  “Are you allowed to Skype into a funeral?” Max asked.

  “You could just go,” Evelyn said. “I mean, what good is owning a jet if you don’t use it?”

  “Ding ding ding ding!” Max’s dad chimed, which he always did when he wanted attention. He popped into the kitchen and announced: “Mom is on her way!”

  Max cast a quick, panicked glance at the oven clock—6:44. “She can’t,” he said. “She’s not supposed to be here till seven. The cupcakes won’t be ready.”

  His dad shrugged. “Nothing we can do now. Her book club buddy just texted me. Guess their dinner ended early.”

  “They must have been discussing a lame book,” Alex said.

  Max opened his mouth to protest, but Alex, Dad, and Smriti were already rushing out of the kitchen. Evelyn rolled back toward the opposite side of the kitchen. “I’ll join you guys in a minute. I think I need to take some meds.”

  But Max was focused on the stove. This sequence of events was all wrong. Mom was supposed to see the cupcakes when she opened the door. Smell them. That was the plan, and plans were supposed to work. Max was getting angry, which meant he smelled cat pee, and that wasn’t too pleasant when it was mixed with chocolate.

  “Max, are you OK?” asked Evelyn from behind him.

  Give up the things you can’t change, Max told himself, which was something his therapist was always getting him to work on. Breathe deep. Close your eyes. “Fine,” he said.

  A few last-minute giggles erupted from the living room, followed by a flurry of sssshhhes. Max opened his eyes. He glanced toward the front of the house, then at the stove.