فصل بیست و پنجم

chapter-25

Kyle flapped his arms and raised his chin.

His flying reptile soared toward the sky.

The game was responding like his cousin’s Xbox, only Mr. Lemoncello’s body-motion sensors were, as Kyle had suspected they might be, much more sophisticated and sensitive.

He tilted his body sideways and his dino-bird sliced through the narrow opening in a vine-tangled clump of prehistoric trees.

After clearing that obstacle, Kyle quickly ducked left to escape the gaping jaws of a lunging Tyrannosaurus rex. Eight of those screeching, short-armed monsters had appeared to snap at the eight flying pterodactyls.

Three of Kyle’s competitors went down, including the kid from Marjory Muldauer’s team.

Angus Harper and Abia Sulayman were just off Kyle’s wings. He cleared the T. rex trap and reached a sandy beach where some smaller dinosaurs were building nests. Kyle waved his arms and soared across the choppy sea.

On the distant horizon, Kyle could see a volcano spewing molten lava. The finish line.

He flapped his arms faster.

When he did, the battery icon on the back of his pterodactyl dipped down to three-quarters. Dr. Zinchenko had been right. Flying fast drained your dino-bird’s life force even faster.

Suddenly, another “flying reptile” from the dinosaur books appeared in the sky: a giant Pteranodon with a thirty-foot wingspan. It was four times as wide as the other fliers and shrieked at the runts in the pterodactyl pack.

Kyle kept his cool and aimed his reptile into what he hoped would be the Pteranodon’s blind spot. The bigger beast gobbled down one flier, which freaked out Stephanie Youngerman from the Mountain team. She shrieked, jumped off her floor mark, and crashed into the ocean.

Only Kyle, Angus, and Abia were left in the race.

“If I was flying any faster,” Angus shouted, “I’d catch up with tomorrow!” “Where you would meet me!” cried the girl.

The two kids flailed their arms furiously. Both of their avatars shot off like rocket ships, streaking the cloudless sky with white contrails.

Kyle could see Abia tuck in her arms and shoulders, making her profile sleekly aerodynamic. She inched ahead of Angus.

Kyle tried his best to mimic Abia’s moves but was buffeted in the wake created by her back draft. He moved his arms up and down and up and down until he looked like a berserk bicycle pump.

He whooshed forward faster but his battery icon dipped down to one-quarter. Its green light was on its way to red.

And the volcanic island was still miles away.

No way would Kyle make it without running out of juice.

He pulled back on his speed, wishing this flying pterodactyl game came with power pellets of some kind. In most video games, there was some way to restore life force after you’d been weakened, and play on. But in this game, there was nothing except the two other pterodactyls, the ocean, and the distant volcano.

Then Kyle remembered something from his library research.

The pterodactyl was a carnivore.

It ate meat and fish.

Maybe there were some virtual fish in the virtual ocean below.

It was worth a shot.

He lowered his chin and sent his dino-bird swooping into a dive, then leveled it out when it was just a few inches above the video ocean’s churning waves.

The water was swarming with fish.

Kyle opened his mouth.

The pterodactyl opened its long spiky jaws.

Kyle did a goosenecked head bob.

The pterodactyl bobbed and scooped up a mouthful of fish.

Kyle heard a WHIRR-DING! sound effect as his red battery icon glowed green and grew from nearly empty to completely full. Raising his head, Kyle gained altitude and zipped across the sky.

He leveled off and aimed for the volcano. Abia Sulayman, who was maybe three hundred feet ahead of him, stalled in midair. Her battery icon was solid red. Kyle shot past her. She dropped like a chunk of fossilized dinosaur bone.

Ahead, Angus Harper appeared to be flying on vapors—barely sputtering, lurching and jerking forward.

His battery icon went red just as Kyle zipped past him.

“You must’ve cheated!” Harper screamed right before his pterodactyl plummeted to its watery grave.

“Nope!” shouted Kyle, executing a pretty nifty barrel roll by swiveling his hips. “I just did my homework!” When Kyle’s pterodactyl reached the volcano, a hot-air balloon rose from the smoldering basin. In the balloon’s wicker gondola was a video-game image of Mr. Lemoncello dressed like the Wizard of Oz.

“Hearty and splendiferous congratulations, Kyle Keeley,” boomed Mr. Lemoncello. “You played hard but you studied harder. You are the true Lord of the Fliers. Therefore, by the power vested in me by the electric company, even though they didn’t know I would be wearing a vest today, I hereby award you the Olympian Researcher medal for meritorious fish mongering. Tonight, at Olympia Village, in honor of your cleverosity, you and your teammates shall feast upon fish sticks and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.” Kyle hoped there might be some kind of cake for dinner, too, because he and his teammates definitely had something to celebrate.

All of a sudden, they were in the lead!