A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,95
seems like the best time to meet, if you mean to do it in secret.”
So we waited. The minutes ticked by. The kid inside put down his phone and started sweeping the floor.
A loud grumbling noise came from the passenger seat, and everyone looked at Enoch.
“Was that a truck engine?” Millard said.
“I’m hungry,” said Enoch, looking down at his stomach.
“Can’t you wait?” said Bronwyn. “What if H comes by but doesn’t see us because we’re in the drive-through, and we miss him?”
“No, Enoch’s got the right idea,” said Millard. “May I see the matchbook again?”
I handed it back to him. Millard turned it over in his hands. “It’s more than just an address,” he said. “It’s a clue. Look what’s written.”
He gave the matchbook to Bronwyn, who read it aloud. “It’s smart to stop here . . . you get more for your money.” She looked up. “So?”
“So,” said Millard, “I think we’re supposed to buy something.”
I started the car and pulled around into the drive-through lane. We rolled up to the ordering speaker and its glowing, backlit menu. A very loud, tinny voice crackled, “WELCOME TO TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR OKAY BURGER WHAT CAN I—”
Bronwyn screamed, and with a lightning-quick reaction, she flung her long arm through the open window and punched the speaker so hard that it unbolted from the ground and fell over, dented and silent.
“Bronwyn, what the hell!” I shouted. “He was just taking our order!”
“Sorry.” Bronwyn shrunk down into her seat. “I got scared.”
“We can’t take you anywhere, can we?” said Enoch.
Under any normal circumstances I would’ve peeled out and left the scene, but this wasn’t a normal circumstance, so I eased my foot off the brake and rolled slowly around to the pickup window, where the kid in the orange apron was still talking into his headset.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
He spoke very slowly, and his eyes were red and puffy. He looked high.
“Hey,” I said. “The speaker, uh, isn’t working.”
He blew out through his mouth, his lips flapping. “Ooooo-kay,” he said, opening his window. “What’ll you have?”
Millard spoke up. “What’s good here?”
“What are you doing?” Emma hissed at him.
The kid scrunched his brow together and peered into the back seat. “Who said that?”
“I did,” said Millard. “I’m invisible. Sorry, should’ve mentioned that.”
“Millard!” Bronwyn exclaimed. “You are so daft!”
But the kid didn’t seem freaked out. “Oh, okay,” he said, nodding highly. “If I were you? Combo two, for sure.”
“Then please prepare us a combo two,” said Millard.
“And five hamburgers, please!” Enoch shouted from the back seat. “With everything. And chips.”
“We don’t have chips,” the guy said.
“He means french fries,” I said.
The kid charged me, I paid, and then he went into the kitchen to prepare the food. He came back a few minutes later and handed me a heavy paper bag that was already turning clear from grease stains. I unrolled the top and looked inside. There were a lot of burgers, a huge order of fries, and a wad of napkins. I distributed the food to my friends, and at the bottom of the bag I noticed a small white envelope. It was fancy-looking and sealed with red wax.
“What’s this?” I said, holding it up to show the others.
Emma shrugged. “Part of the combo?”
I drove into the lot, parked, and opened the envelope. I turned on the dome light to read by, and everyone leaned over to look. Inside the envelope was another napkin, but this one had been typed on. With a typewriter. The greasy napkin read:
Uncontacted subject being hunted, highly threatened.
Mission: protect and extract.
Suggest delivery to loop 10044.
Extreme caution advised.
That was it. The uncontacted peculiar wasn’t named. It didn’t specify where loop 10044 was. But on the back of the napkin was a set of coordinates.
“I can read coordinates,” Millard said excitedly. “The line of longitude number is negative, which means it’s well west of the prime meridian—”
“It’s a high school in Brooklyn, New York,” I said, holding up my phone. “I typed them into the Maps app.”
Millard harrumphed. “No piece of technology can replace a real cartographer.”
“We’ve got a mission, and we’ve got a location,” Emma said. “The only thing we don’t have is the name of the peculiar we’re looking for.”
“Maybe H doesn’t know the name, either,” said Bronwyn, “and finding it out is part of the mission.”
“Or it’s for security,” said Enoch. “You wouldn’t want to go around naming uncontacted peculiars on napkins that could fall into the hands of, say, a hamburger chef.”